Critical Thinking: Course Analysis

Chapter 4 was about Critical Thinking. First, it goes over the six stages of listening which are hearing, understanding, remembering, interpreting, evaluating, and responding. Then the book talks about how cultural differences affect listening. Then, the benefits of critical listening such as reduced stress, more learning, improved speaker-audience relationships, improved decision making, improved speaking, and a better society. The four types of listening are introduced which are listening for pleasure, to provide emotional support, to get information, and to make an evaluation. The chapter ends with ways to improve your listening behaviors.

In our lives there are many different cognitive biases that can interfere with our ability to solve problems and/or make rational decisions. One that I think is especially problematic, and has been for quite some time, is representativeness heuristic. This is defined as the tendency to make judgments about a group membership based on physical appearances or the match between a person and one’s stereotype of a group rather than on base rate information. And essentially, a stereotype is the use of concepts to make generalizations about a group of people. (pgs. 252-253) Stereotyping in this country is, and always has been, a huge problem.

A. This chapter deals with the concept of how our countries private industrial interests are making money off creating fear in the public. He talks about how the media creates fear using national and international issues to create fear in us. He also talks about how our Government is a part of the media’s strategy to create fear in society. Also, that the church plays into it by responding to what is seen and reported in the news as a response to the times. - 82 words

What did you already know about Critical Thinking: Making Inferences and Analyzing the Author’s Message? Respond to each concept. What did you already know about making inferences? What did you already know about analyzing the author’s message?

“Most: Conger (1991) states in many instances an executive will overtly or covertly influence a team’s proposal, perhaps by picking team members whose opinions are already known, making his or her preferences clear in advance, or signaling opinions during the recommendation phase. If that is the case, the decision maker becomes a de facto member of the recommendation team and can no longer judge the quality of the proposal because his or her own biases have influenced it”

In our classroom text, the authors Chaffee, McMahon, and Stout highlight four key factors that we as writers and readers should include in our thoughts. “1. Thinking actively, 2. Thinking independently, 3. Viewing a situation from different perspectives, 4. Supporting diverse perspectives with evidence and reasons” (2008).

Week 5 what a journey through this critical thinking class. I have learned so much and how to apply the what I have learned to situations in my life whether it is personal or professional. The 5-step process I think for me was the best of all realizing that there is a method in problem solving. It will work even it the solution is not in your favor all the time. Ms. Sessmons I am happy that you made me dig deeper in my thought process to actual think about things before just writing them done. This also made me look at the way that I answer questions, cause me to be slow to speak listen to the entire situation then apply the correct concept before just giving an anwser. I would highly recommend this class to everybody it is

In a modern society of 21st century, we live in a “free world”, but talking much about freedom. We consider ourselves as individuals, yet the conception of the word “individual” becomes cloudier than with every day. While we are proudly saying, “I decide for myself, I’m an individual”, some of us do not even recognize that most of our own ideas and principles depend on influence of the society on us. Our behavior is often depends on if we are in a large group or by our own. Our principles and are often come out of imitation of ideas of people who surround us.

Have you ever wondered what drives the thinking and decision making process? Critical thinking is an intellectually disciplined six step process that allows a person to think more rationally by gathering and using evidence. Being able to think critically helps a person from making blind decisions and also allows them to recognize and see through nonsense. Critical thinking is useful in everything including reading, writing, speaking, and listening. It gives people the power to question everything they see, hear, and read. The six steps in critical thinking are remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating. Remembering is the lowest step of the process. It involves recognizing or recalling things that occurred in the past. The

Critical thinking has numerous definitions. The one I found most helpful was from Kallet (2014), who states that critical thinking is “manual thinking (not automatic), purposeful, being aware of the partiality of your thinking, a process, and uses a tool set” (p.3-4). To me, this means that I aware of my thinking, I am not on autopilot, but am aware of a problem, situation, concern, etc. and I am purposefully thinking about that. I am fully aware and attempting to come to a conclusion, looking at the different scenarios, situations, and outcomes and weighing the pros and cons of these. There is a process to critical thinking and I am aware of the process. Plencner (2014) states that “Critical thinkers tend to view the truth as a kind of perspective” (p.10). Therefore, I am willing to look at others perspectives and I am willing to turn the dial on my own perspective, should I discover that it is necessary. By

The first concept I learned when enhancing my critical thinking in inductive generalizations is the research design, which is an important concept when using scientific procedure. The order of the research design is first is starts with a question, which are the characteristics of interest concerning a target population (Diestler 2012). The second concept is the hypothesis a speculation about what will be discovered from a research study (Diestler 2012). The third concept would be the sample, which are members of the target population who are studied by a research (Diestler 2012). The fourth concept would be a control group, which is a group of subjects from the sample who get no treatment or a placebo and are thus a test benchmark (Diestler

I believe the biggest reason Appalachian State University has theatre as a general education option is to enforce the critical thinking ability in their students. Appalachian is a liberal arts school and critical thinking is a major part of liberal arts. In fact, I think this was the main intention of the course was critical thinking, with this being the first assignment we did in this course. Along with critical thinking skills, we developed a higher skill for analyzing and creativity. I believe throughout my college experience these skills will be very useful to me. I mainly find this type of critical thinking, analyzing, and creativity better useful for English majors or majors that require an abundance of writing. Being a math major myself,

Critical thinking is often an idea that is thrown around in academic settings. The concept of critical thinking is assumed to be known to whomever is being addressed. This is a story where I came into a situation because I believe I failed to use critical thinking.

A problem that I have faced in one of my college class was being able to start a paper on time and not wait for the night before to do it. This was one of my main problem this past semester that I struggled and had to come out with a solution to stop procastinating on papers. Everytime this will happen, I will always go to sleep late and would had a hard time concentrating in my morning class the day after. The hill-climbing heuristic, the means-ends heuristic and the analogy approach could help me solve my problem. "The means-ends- heuristic is appropiate because it requires you to identify the ends that you want and the figure out the means or method that you will use to reach those ends" (Feltovich et al, Ward & Morris, p.419). This

This course has expanded tremendously my critical thinking skills. I am able to research information for a specific topic having in mind the critical thinking elements. Thus allowing me to focus more on precision data rather than unorganized perspectives. In addition when reading articles I am able to determine and analyze the author’s assumptions on their topic. Which helps in pointing out my own assumptions and makes me aware not to utilize them or minimize my usage in my essays. Furthermore, I am able to better criticize the articles I am reading, much like dissecting all aspects of the research to determine the true purpose of the article and it’s benefits. Although, it takes much more time to read a single article with time I think I