Critical Thinking: A User's Manual

The skill-building approach employed in CRITICAL THINKING: A USER'S MANUAL helps students to cumulatively develop the basic skills of argument recognition, analysis, and evaluation.

Clear, conversational, step-by-step explanations and workbook-style features make complex course material manageable and accessible. Multiple opportunities for practice in a variety of formats ensure that students apply what they have learned, regardless of their dominant learning style.

Students are introduced to Bloom's Taxonomy early in the text, and are shown throughout the book how they are developing the higher-order thinking skills identified in the upper levels of the taxonomy.

"Your Turn!" exercises are interspersed throughout the text to help students focus their reading, check their understanding, and prepare for classroom discussion. These activities help students to apply, synthesize, and analyze what they are learning in terms of their own understanding and experiences.

The "Putting it All Together" feature at the end of each chapter provides a comprehensive writing exercise which requires students to integrate all previously learned skills with those learned in that chapter.

The text offers opportunities to apply the skills students learn in a special exercise, "One Step Further," included at the end of Chapters 2–12. Examples of arguments encountered in further course work in students' academic career provide the foundation for this additional and stimulating practice.

Learning outcomes are presented in a bulleted list at the beginning of Chapters 1 through 12. They describe measurable skills to help students and instructors evaluate individual progress; skills are also transferable into any instructor's syllabus.

Learning outcomes are tied to the chapter content: The exercise sets throughout the chapter help students and instructors measure the acquisition of the skills taught in the text. End-of-chapter review questions provide an additional opportunity to review the learning outcomes.

The text offers opportunities to apply the skills students learn in a new special exercise, "One Step Further," included at the end of Chapters 2 through 12. Examples of arguments encountered in further course work in students' academic career provide the foundation for this additional and stimulating practice. This activity, with a higher level of difficulty than in-chapter exercises, enables users to take a measure of their comprehension and mastery of the concepts and skills learned in the chapter. It may also be used by instructors as a group activity.

The chapter devoted to fallacies is expanded; it now follows the chapters that cover the evaluation of arguments and precedes the last chapter, which is dedicated to constructing arguments.

The presentation of the methods for evaluating arguments is broken up to balance the coverage: Chapters 6 (Evaluating Categorical Arguments) and 7 (Evaluating Truth-Functional Arguments) are streamlined, and two new supplementary chapters at the end of the book introduce the remaining content on these topics.

The first three chapters are amended to strengthen the introduction of basic critical thinking concepts, such as critical reading, language and rhetoric, the distinction between arguments and explanations, and conditionals.