Critical Thinking Across the Curriculum Project

Longview Community College (Lee's Summit, MO, USA).

A very rich repository of resources for teaching critical thinking, both discipline-specific and general. Particularly impressive are the online exercises for teaching critical thinking in psychology courses. These seem appropriate for any undergraduate-level psychology class, and could be adapted quite easily for use in other social sciences. Other highlights of the site include:

• the outline for the CTAC Project's Seminar Program, intended to help interested instructors start similar projects on their campuses;
• a thorough description and review of SmartPrim, a critical thinking tutorial software program designed for use with health-science majors but applicable to others;
• an article on teaching critical thinking by Dr. Bonnie W. Duldt, author of SmartPrim.

The pages devoted to core resources compiled by Longview instructors for teaching critical thinking in any discipline also have a great deal of valuable information. The authors present core critical-thinking concepts as roughly equivalent to informal logic, and walk the user through each concept in step-by-step fashion, with lots of examples and explanation. There is a lot of text, however, and some may feel that the informal logic approach is not entirely appropriate for teaching critical thinking in certain disciplines, although the authors make a fairly good case for the usefulness of this orientation.

The Center for Critical Thinking at Sonoma State University

Sonoma, CA, USA.

Another excellent source of online resources for teaching critical thinking at any level, and of information on the many seminars, workshops, and conferences offered by the CCT, including its weekend institutes for educators in Seattle and San Diego (each spring), and the three-day International Conference on Critical Thinking at Sonoma State (late July or early August each summer).

Highlights of the site:

• Thorough and concise outlines of topics covered in all seminars, conferences, and workshops;
• Information grouped into K-12 and higher education tracks, making it easy for users to find resources most appropriate for their teaching level;
• Availability of information about customized workshops that CCT staff can present on users' campuses -- including abstracts of possible session topics;
• Online handouts on various aspects of teaching critical thinking; e.g., "Overview of How to Design Instruction" or "The Role of Questions in Thinking, Teaching, & Learning." These are detailed and lucid, and appear excellent for instructors who want to increase their focus on critical thinking, but are not sure of how best to begin;
• Sample syllabi from courses with a critical-thinking focus, both stand-alone and discipline-specific.

Mission: Critical

San Jose State's Critical Thinking Web Page (San Jose, CA, USA).

A very colorful and user-friendly site, whose goal is a "virtual laboratory" to "familiarize users with basic concepts of critical thinking in a self-paced, interactive environment." The site is intended primarily to provide students with a solid foundation -- and a lot of practice -- in basic principles of informal logic, so that they may build more advanced thinking skills on this foundation in their courses. The site's authors note that San Jose State offers critical thinking courses in Communication Studies, English, History, Linguistics, Philosophy, and Psychology, and their aim is that Mission: Critical be useful in as many of these areas as possible.

The obvious highlight is the tutorial itself, accessed through the Main Menu. It covers the basics of argument analysis, inductive and deductive reasoning, causal and conditional arguments, syllogism, and fallacious and non-rational persuasion. Each concept is explained clearly and concisely, with abundant examples: although this makes for a lot of text, it is lucid and easy to follow. There are practice exercises for each concept, with immediate feedback given for each response. It seems that students who worked through all of the exercises would have a solid grasp of the foundations of informal logic. Since transfer and application of these thinking skills is crucial for students to get the most from them, however, it would be interesting to know how instructors in various disciplines teach students to use this knowledge in their classes.

The site also has links to (a) other critical thinking Web sites, and (b) a fairly long list of recently published critical thinking textbooks, with reviews for a few of them.