The Improvement of Critical Thinking Skills in What Philosophy Is

After determining one set of skills that we hoped our students were learning in the introductory philosophy class at Carnegie Mellon University, we designed an experiment to test whether they were actually learning these skills. In addition, there were four sections of this course in the Spring of 2004, and the students in Section 1 were taught the material using argument diagrams as a tool to aid understanding and critical evaluation, while the other students were taught using more traditional methods. So, we were also interested in whether this tool would help the students develop the skills we hoped they would master in this course. In each section of this course, the students were given a pre-test at the beginning of the semester, and a structurally identical post-test at the end. We determined that the students did develop the skills in which we were interested over the course of the semester. We also determined that the students in Section 1 gained significantly more than the other students, and that this was due almost entirely to their ability to use argument diagrams. We conclude that learning how to construct argument diagrams significantly improves a student’s ability to analyze, comprehend, and evaluate arguments.