Cover of Inquiry: Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines
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1. Inquiry: Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines: Volume > 26 > Issue: 3
Frank Fair From the Editor’s Desk
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2. Inquiry: Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines: Volume > 26 > Issue: 3
Richard Paul Reflections on the Nature of Critical Thinking, Its History, Politics, and Barriers and on Its Status across the College/UniversityCurriculum Part I
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This paper is a response to INQUIRY editor Frank Fair’s invitation to me to write a reflective piece that sheds light on my involvement in the field of Critical Thinking Studies (some 35 years). My response is in two parts. The two parts together might be called “Reflections on the nature of critical thinking and on its status across the college/university curriculum.” The parts together have been written with a long term and large-scale end in view. If successful the two parts will shed light on why the critical thinking movement has not yet contributed significantly to human emancipation or to more just and fair-minded communities (world wide). It will also present some strategies for making such a contribution.
3. Inquiry: Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines: Volume > 26 > Issue: 3
Patricia A. Ralston, Anne E. Larson, Cathy L. Bays An Assessment of Undergraduate Engineering Students’ Critical Thinking Skills Guided by the Paul-Elder Critical Thinking Framework
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Faculty in a large, urban school of engineering designed a longitudinal study to assess the critical thinking skills of undergraduate students as they progressed through the engineering program. The Paul-Elder critical thinking framework was used to design course assignments and develop a holistic assessment rubric. This paper presents the analysis of the freshman course artifacts (baseline and course critical thinking assignments) and associated faculty scoring sessions for all three cohorts. A total of 649 first semester freshman students at least 18 years old agreed to participate in the study. The majority were white males with a mean high school grade point average of 3.73, ACT composite score of 28.33, and final freshman engineering course grade of 3.57. There was a statistically significant positive relationship between the freshman course artifacts and the faculty scores. Data from the study are being used to enhance the critical thinking experiences for undergraduate engineering students.
4. Inquiry: Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines: Volume > 26 > Issue: 3
Clyde Freeman Herreid In Case You Didn’t Know: Critical Thinking and The Case Study Approach to Teaching Science
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Case studies are increasingly used in the teaching of science. They are effective in the teaching of critical thinking skills because case studies place the subject matter in the context of a memorable story. Today there are case study repositories such as the National Center for Case Study Teaching in Science at the University at Buffalo with hundreds of cases and teaching notes and workshops to train faculty in their use. A new book is in press, Science Stories: Using Case Studies to Teach Critical Thinking, which includes 37 cases for introductory science courses. Serious study of the effectiveness of the method is just beginning with several reports newly published or in progress. Future work needs to focus on the efficacy of the different case study approaches; a predictive model is presented that suggests that the most effective learning will come from those methods with the most student interaction.
5. Inquiry: Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines: Volume > 26 > Issue: 3
Yoram Harpaz Back to Knowledge: The Ironic Path of Teaching Thinking
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The article follows the conceptual path made by the teaching thinking movement. It emerged as a reaction to the explosion, obsolescence, availability, and relativity of knowledge, as a call to teach thinking instead of knowledge, and returned to knowledge in the form of the third approach to teaching thinking — teaching for understanding. Understanding knowledge is the essential, perhaps even sufficient, condition for good — effective, critical and creative — thinking.
6. Inquiry: Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines: Volume > 26 > Issue: 3
Ben Hamby Eating Flowers, Holding Hands: Should Critical Thinking Pedagogy ‘Go Wild’?
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This paper is inspired by Anthony Weston’s “What if Teaching Went Wild?” (2004), in which he proposes a radical approach to environmental education, suggesting among other things a stress on “otherness.” Comparing Weston’s proposal to Richard Paul’s (1992) concept of the “strong sense” critical thinker, and to Trudy Govier’s (2010) rationale for her pedagogy of argument, I suggest that “going wild” in stand-alone critical thinking courses could provide a positive, unsettling push, helping students to reconnect through the otherness of alternative argumentation.