Resources

This essay argues that teachers would be more effective at promoting students' willingness to work hard at course content that seems to them remote and abstract if teachers explicitly presented that content to students more as a means to their education rather than as the aim of their education. Teachers should confront the fact that most of the content they teach will be forgotten by students. Once this fact is accepted, then it follows that teaching content that teachers know will be forgotten as if it should never be forgotten is myopic and perhaps dysfunctional. An alternative teaching model is to use course content to stimulate the flourishing of developmental human skills--rationality, language, aesthetic responsiveness, imagination, introspection, moral and ethical deliberation, sociability, and physicality--in the service of a developmental notion of liberal education that can never go out of date and can never be forgotten because its effects become absorbed as developmentally advanced orientations of life, not crammed into short-term memory for the sake of passing tests.

This article draws six key lessons from cognitive science for teachers of critical thinking. The lessons are: acquiring expertise in critical thinking is hard; practice in critical thinking skills themselves enhances skills; the transfer of skills must be practiced; some theoretical knowledge is required; diagramming arguments ("argument mapping") promotes skill; and students are prone to belief preservation. The article provides some guidelines for teaching practice in light of these lessons.

Asserts that the relationship between students and faculty is the result of responses to a negotiated social setting. Reports on a study of 132 college students on factors that might affect class participation. Offers four recommendations for faculty to encourage student participation and responses to questions.

Analysis of interview and classroom observation data collected through four institutional case studies reveals some consistent findings regarding how writing assignments and class discussions can be made conducive to critical thinking development.