Teaching an Applied Critical Thinking Course: How Applied Can We Get? E

T to each oneing an Applied Critical persuasion Course How Applied Can We Get?ABSTRACT Encouraging students to present classroom knowledge in their personal, everyday life is a major(ip) problem confronting many teachers of captious thinking. For example, while a student qualification recognize an ad hominem argument in a classroom exercise, it is sort of another thing for him or her to avoid the same in interpersonal relations, say with parents, siblings, and peers. One approach to this problem is the creation of interaction parcel to which students sight turn for input on the rationality of their own thinking. Students crumb then speak to computers rather than instructors almost their private lives without having to share occult information with any other human being, yet still begin relevant feedback. I discuss computer software technology that actu completelyy performs this function. The software in question is an interactive, artificial intelligence program that chec ks beliefs for faulty thinking (fallacies), including inductive and deductive errors. The system s spates student essays for possible fallacies asks questions at relevant junctions provides individualized feedback on fallacies committed provides summaries of fallacies found diagnoses thinking problems issues recommendations and provides other given(p) information. The current movement in applied doctrine has helped to re-awaken the Socratic picture that philosophy is a way of living and not merely an schoolman pursuit. The crux of this movement has been that philosophical theories and methods can make valuable contributions to applicative life problems. One very visible area of applied philosophy has been that of ethics. Thus, applied ethics today includes applications of philosoph... ... of fallacy commission in each of the five groups of fallacies addressed in the course. In a sample of about 150 community college students, the mean enumerate score on the PLAI pre-test was 1 32.543, whereas the total mean score on the post-test was 113.647 indicating a overall improvement (across all five fallacy categories) of 18.896.CONCLUSIONWhile, at this juncture, more data ask to be collected and its significance evaluated, there is reason to think that instructors of critical thinking can, with the assistance of computer technology such as that summarized above, in effect narrow the gap between classroom and students external world. Without undue invasions of students privacy, instructors can oversee and assess their students efforts in applying critical thinking to personal living. And they can do this without ever having to leave the classroom