Building Case Studies for Reading and Critical Thinking

What Is Critical Thinking?

The Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) identifies critical thinking as one of a set of skills and defines it in terms of performance on a task:

“Applied in combination, critical thinking, analytic reasoning, and problem solving skills are required to perform well on CLA tasks. We define these skills as how well students can evaluate and analyze source information, and subsequently to draw conclusions and present an argument based upon that analysis.” “Architecture of the CLA Task,” 8. http://www.collegiatelearningassessment.org/files/Architecture_of_the_CLA_Tasks.pdf

How to teach critical thinking skills?

Life experience

Course in logic

Curriculum of courses in a major

Series of four integrative seminars

Nothing—You have to be born with them.

The CLA has developed a set of tasks to measure reading, writing, and critical thinking skills.

Make an Argument Critique an Argument Performance Task

CLA in the Classroom

An initiative to help students learn these skills, focusing on the performance task, as the most integrative, demanding, and immersive.

What is a Performance Task?

A kind of case study: A situation A role A task A set of readings

But there are three crucial, distinctive features of Performance Tasks:

The situation is fictional The readings are created

most crucially and distinctively, problematic evidence and logical fallacies are embedded in the readings.

Pause for epiphany

[Description of how, thirty years ago, college teachers had a very undeveloped understanding of how to teach many of the unspoken assumptions and expectations of academic writing. Now, thanks to groundbreaking teachers, theorists, and textbook writers in the 1980s, these assumptions and expectations are much more visible to us, and we now have strategies and assignments for making them visible to students.]

Might strategies and materials like Performance Tasks help do the same for teaching critical thinking, or is this a false analogy?

We’ll see.

Sample Performance Task: Crime Reduction

[Here the presentation used a combination of handouts and materials displayed on a document camera to examine a sample Performance Task.]

[Click on this link and scroll to Section 1:10 (page 33) to see the Crime Reduction Performance Task http://www.collegiatelearningassessment.org/files/Architecture_of_the_CLA_Tasks.pdf The Performance Task documents cannot be opened. Contact Ellen at emcmanus@dom.edu if you would like to examine the documents.]

[The presentation then continued as a small-group project to identify possible Performance Task topics, tasks, and lists of documents.]

Possible Topics: Creating “Green Campus” policies Creating policies for using technology in middle school classrooms Proposing a gang intervention program Designing an employee fitness program Designing a memorial for a controversial war

Crime Reduction Documents: Investigator’s memo Newspaper story Police tables Government report State crime statistics Chart created by the candidate Abstracts of research articles

Other Possible Documents Research articles Other academic articles Personal essays Editorials, Opinion Columns, Letters to the Editor Brochures Web sites Blogs

More Possible Documents Political speeches Transcripts of t.v. or radio talk shows Legislation Mission statements Codes of conduct Advertisements Press releases

And Posters Photographs Works of art Magazine covers Etc.

[After the groups reported on their topics, tasks, and documents, each group was asked to choose a document and discuss how a logical fallacy or other kind of weakness might be embedded in the writing of that document.]

Common Logical Fallacies Slippery slope Post hoc ergo propter hoc Appeal to authority Ad hominem Faulty comparison Red herring Begging the question

More Logical Fallacies Straw man Hasty generalization Poisoning the well Guilt by association Biased example Appeal to emotion Appeal to fear

Also consider using Misleading representations of data Weak evidence Poorly structured research Contradictory evidence Outdated evidence Emotional manipulation Obfuscatory writing

and other kinds of case studies, Performance Tasks, and other kinds of case studies, require a great deal of work to create, and ideally they draw on knowledge from a variety of disciplines.

indeed probably demand, Therefore, they reward, indeed probably demand, collaborative effort,

which is, after all, the Dominican way!

Also, good case studies can be publishable.

Or at the very least put in the CLA library.

If you are interested in working on a case study, please contact me emcmanus@dom.edu Jody Cressman jcressman@dom.edu or David Dolence ddolence@dom.edu

in creating case studies and critical thinking skills! Thank you for your interest in creating case studies to teach reading and critical thinking skills!