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Archive for the ‘Education’ Category

Some argument mapping reading

Posted in Argument Mapping, Critical Thinking, Education on November 13, 2009 | Leave a Comment »

Martin Davies, a colleague of mine at the University of Melbourne and a energetic advocate of argument mapping in teaching critical thinking has published “Computer-assisted argument mapping: a rationale approach” in the journal Higher Education.  In the article Martin describes using argument mapping in an upper-level Economics subject, and discusses how the students themselves regarded the [...]

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The Rationale for Rationale™

Posted in Argument Mapping, Education, Intelligence Augmentation, Rationale, Reasoning, Research on July 26, 2007 | 2 Comments »

 Now available – the final version of my paper prepared in connection with the conference Graphic and Visual Representations of Evidence and Inference in Legal Settings in January this year.  The paper is now called The Rationale for Rationale™.

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Want Logic? Teach Logic

Posted in Education, Reasoning, Teaching on May 23, 2007 | 3 Comments »

That’s the title the editor gave to a letter I had published in the Education Age (21 May 07), commenting on an opinion piece by my University of Melbourne colleague Marty Ross.  Since they don’t make the letters to Education Age available online, I’m putting it up here.
Marty’s piece generally was very good.  He and [...]

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Yep, that’s what we do…

Posted in Argument Mapping, Critical Thinking, Education, Reasoning, Teaching on February 24, 2007 | 2 Comments »

On the AILACT list, Michael Scriven wrote:
Mark got in a dig about ’speed reasoning’ my most popular course; perhaps I should mention that the first thing I say in the first session is, there’s no royal road to speed reasoning, you just have to become good at plain old slow reasoning first, [...]

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Argument Mapping in Introduction to Philosophy

Posted in Argument Mapping, Education on December 14, 2006 | 5 Comments »

For many years the only university subject I’ve been teaching has been Critical Thinking: The Art of Reasoning, at the University of Melbourne. This is one-semester subject devoted almost entirely to improving reasoning, argument and critical thinking skills – a kind of “boot camp” for rational thinkers. This subject has been the environment in which [...]

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Critical thinking in the secondary classroom

Posted in Critical Thinking, Education on December 4, 2006 | Leave a Comment »

An inspiring account from Kylie Sturgess of the Methodist Ladies College in Perth, Western Australia.  Kylie was runner-up in the 2006 Australian Skeptics‘ Prize for Critical Thinking.

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Lots means Lots

Posted in Critical Thinking, Education, Research on December 3, 2006 | Leave a Comment »

How do you help your students to achieve really worthwhile gains in critical thinking skills?
We worked on this problem for about five years at the University of Melbourne. We wanted a method for improving critical thinking skills which demonstrably achieves substantial results.
I’ll add now that we wanted a method which reliably acheives these results, [...]

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Help is on the way

Posted in Critical Thinking, Education on November 29, 2006 | Leave a Comment »

In an email exchange with Jeff Ricker, who is putting together a good resource site on critical thinking for faculty at Scottsdale Community College, I sketched the following scenario:

“I teach business studies, but my students are depressingly bad at basic critical thinking activities – for example they have trouble producing a piece of [...]

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