Critical Thinking

Critical Thinking Wiki for Dr. Alfino's students

Knowledge, Perspective, Inquiry Assignments

This semester we're piloting two new assignments on Knowledge aquisition and Perspective/Bias to prepare students for their research assignment.

Knowledge Aquisition Assignment

Wikipediaassignmentv2.doc Here's the worksheet for the Wikipedia assignment on knowledge aquisition.

Perspective Assignment

Perspective Assignment

An indispensible skill for a critical thinker is that ability to understand the range of positions and points of view on an issue and to be familiar with the theoretical and practical points of views of major sources of thought and opinion. This skill helps us understand when we have seen a full range of positions and when we have likely been exposed to evidence and argumentation contrary to our own sympathies.

Journals of Thought and Opinion

Use this handout to determine the point of view or position of popular magazines and news magazines. Most of the popular periodicals have an editorial stance which may be liberal, conservative or mainstream, depending upon the publication's writers and editors. The goal of this assignment is for you to write an annotation or summary of the articles you have found in your database searching. In the summary you can clarify the viewpoint presented in the magazine articles you have selected for your preliminary bibliography.

Journals of Thought and Opinion.doc

Spring 2007 Research Topic Search

We'll start working on narrowing topics after Spring Break.

In the Fall semester, the following topics were chosen: Immigration Reform, Marriage Reform, AP courses in High School, Media Bias, Sex Trafficing, Sex Offender Notification Laws, Global Warming, Performance Enhancing Drugs, and Stem Cell Research. These topics all worked well.

The two basic requirements for good topics are: 1) There must be reasonable differences of opinion about how to think about the topic. 2) The topic must be researchable.

Study Question Collaboration

Follow this link to the Critical Thinking Study Question Collaboration Page, where you can post your answers to the study questions, edit answers and comment upon them. If you all do a good job with this, everyone does better on the test, and I get to make the course harder for the next batch of students!