Using Argument Mapping to Improve Critical Thinking Skills

The centrality of critical thinking (CT) as a goal of higher education is uncontroversial. In a recent high-profile book, Academically Adrift , Arum and Roksa report that “99 percent of college faculty say that developing students’ ability to think critically is a ‘very important’ or ‘essential’ goal of undergraduate education” (2011, 35), citing (HERI 2009). However a major message of their work is that college education generally makes little progress toward this goal: “Many students are only minimally improving their skills in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing during their journeys through higher education” (35). Indeed for many students college education appears to be failing completely in this regard: “With a large sample of more than 2,300 students, we observe no statistically significant gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills for at least 45 percent of the students in our study” (36). Their message is barely more positive than H. L. Mencken’s acerbic comment, over a century ago: “Certainly everyday observation shows that the average college course produces no visible augmentation in the intellectual equipment and capacity of the student. Not long ago, in fact, an actual demonstration in Pennsylvania demonstrated that students often regress so much during their four years that the average senior is less intelligent, by all known tests, than the average freshman” (Mencken 1997, 98). Yet we also know that college education can positively impact CT; simply put, CT can be taught. In a meta-analysis of 117 studies of college-level efforts to teach critical thinking, Abrami et al. found “a generally positive effect of instruction on students’ CT skills” (2008, 1119). However the amount of gain found in these studies varied widely, and Abrami et al. concluded that it makes quite a difference how CT is taught. They say “both the type of CT intervention and the pedagogical grounding of the 11 Using Argument Mapping to Improve Critical Thinking Skills