Critical Thinking

Transitioning to doctoral level writing requires solid critical thinking skills. Three areas are vital for you to develop: making claims, using evidence, and underlying assumptions. Your first paper is a two-to-three page (double spaced) paper where you will research those concepts and develop an integrated approach that you can use throughout your doctoral studies. (pick whatever topic you see fit to complete this study)

I wanted to quickly give you a couple of suggestions on proper formatting / critical thinking that will also help with your first IEE paper:

1 - Please properly format your citations and references. Check the DBA 705 Student Resources folder for help on this.

2 - Please be sure to address all required parts of the paper. In this instance it meant looking at claims, evidence, and assumptions and developing an approach you can use that incorporates them. These required components are very clearly defined in both the paper guidelines and rubric that are in the content area under "Start Here" and "Paper Requirements." Please review the requirements and rubric for the first IEE paper thoroughly to ensure you do not leave out any required components.

3 - Be careful with the word "proven" or any form of it. Most of our research fails to support a null hypothesis. That is what our statistical tests examine. That does not equate to noting that the alternative has been proven. Failure to disprove the lack of relationship does not mean we have proven that there is one. We simply infer that a relationship exists.

It's an issue of semantics, but an important one to understand. To establish causality, a number of conditions must occur, including temporal precedence (one MUST precede the other and not the other way), and ruling out potential alternative explanations for the observed effect. Those two criteria is where most of our research falls short. You will learn more about these issues in your upcoming stats classes.

4 - Try to avoid making claims that do not have evidence as support ;-) This first critical thinking brief is a short document that is all about claims, evidence, and assumptions. Inevitably I see papers that make claims with no evidence.

5 - Use peer-reviewed sources as much as possible. Don't rely on dictionary definitions as they pose multiple issues: frequently there is more than one definition of the word; the literature may treat the term a bit differently; and there may be some interesting variations in the literature, i.e. multiple definitions.