The first assignment served as a great foundation to begin as a student taking a critical thinking course. The beginning chapters of Epstein’s Critical Thinking, taking in chapters one all the way up to nine, involves digesting so many different ideas at once--all in which these ideas are probably new in terms of the way students actually analyze each claim and premise and conclusion. Having to take these ideas in was a little overwhelming at first, let alone having to apply these new concepts to a random article we picked off the internet.
Reading these articles, we had to ask several questions. Is this a claim? Can I believe it’s true? How can I back it up? Are these premises and claim good, bad, valid, or strong?
Right off the bat, this first assignment conditioned our analyzing eyes to answer these questions and measure the validity and greatness of a claim and our analysis of it. It seems after this assignment, I was more trained than ever to throw out a judgment call with the use of all the critical thinking concepts, because I was forced to exercise these concepts to current events.
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
First assignment as a foundation.
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I agree with your outlook on the first assignment. There was so much information to digest and at the same time we had to apply it to a major assignment so quickly.
ReplyDeleteBut I also believe that this helped us be more flexible when it comes to new ideas. Rather than taking our tie, this assignment demanded us to be on top of things and get the work done as soon as possible.
It was a good experience for me and I think everyone else in the class was greatly affected by this course assignment in a good way. Hopefully everyone can learn from this assignment.
The first assignment I found to also be useful for similar reasons as yours. We learned so much in the first few chapters and this assignment allowed us to use a great amount of what we learned by analyzing current events. It definitely helped give us practice on how to analyze articles that we may read on a daily basis in a magazine or newspaper. Im really glad we did this assignment to help us actually use what we learned and also I found it helpful that it was a group assignment, which helped if we didn't understand a certain topic.
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