No abstract

Critical thinking (CT) is often listed in college catalogues as one of an institution' s educational goals. According to Derek Bok (2006), "Nationwide polls have found that more than 90% of faculty members in the U.S. consider it [CT] the most important purpose of undergraduate education" (pp. 67-68). Although enhancing students' CT skills and dispositions is surely a worthy outcome, such a goal creates a number of challenges. First, faculties must decide on a defensible conception of CT. As those familiar with the literature know, this is no easy task. There are many conceptions, and each implies a slightly different set of skills or emphases (Hatcher, 2000;Lipman, 2006).Once faculty members have agreed on the relevant skills, they must next confront the added challenge of choosing an appropriate assessment tool. If faculty members do not want to go down the laborious paths of collecting and evaluating student portfolios (Possin, 2008), or creating and attempting to validate their own assessment instrument, then they must choose from the numerous standardized critical-thinking tests that are on the market, administer the test, record pretest and posttest scores, and if possible perform an error analysis to determine which areas of student performance were weakest. Finally, after this process, faculty members are challenged to determine the strengths and weaknesses of their attempts to teach CT skills and adjust their pedagogy accordingly. 29The author would like to thank Molly Ireland, his accomplished student assistant, for grading hundreds of CCTST tests, entering the names and data on spreadsheets, and doing the statistics found throughout this chapter.

This paper provides evidence and arguments that, given the choice of teaching critical thinking and written composition as separate, stand-alone courses or combining them, the two should be combined into an integrated sequence.

No abstract

After critiquing the arguments against using formal logic to teach critical thinking, this paper argues that for theoretical, practical, and empirical reasons, instruction in the fundamentals of formal logic is essential for critical thinking, and so should be included in every class that purports to teach critical thinking.