Critical thinking

A three to four page critical thinking essay synthesising the prewriting from Part I: stating a position on a ProCon.org issue, giving three supporting premises with reasons for their selection, answering the believing questions about three opposing premises, examining two biases you experienced, and discussing the effect of your own enculturation on those biases.

A three to four page paper choosing a population that should use critical thinking and developing a tool to assess or measure the cognitive habits and behaviours that form part of that population's critical thinking process, consisting of eight questions each addressing a specific cognitive habit or behaviour with a rationale explaining why that question measures it, drawn from Box 2-5 and Appendix A of the Rubenfeld and Scheffer text, introduced by a discussion of why these habits matter and closed by a conclusion, with a minimum of two scholarly resources.

A reflective journal of two to three pages responding to three prompts after reading chapters one to three and participating in the week's discussion: your own brief definition of critical thinking in four to six lines, why the authors describe chapters twelve to fourteen as the heart of the matter, which two concepts those chapters emphasise, how you define those concepts and why the authors find them important, and your greatest challenge for the session and for this class with how the first three chapters' concepts could help you meet it.

The prompt tells you to look at the mural before reading about it, and that instruction is the lesson. Four questions, answered with reasons rather than reactions.

The prompt says the post is not about being right. It is about examining your own reasoning, which is harder and much rarer.

The value you name matters less than the shape of the argument. Ideological reasoning runs top-down and fails on its premises, and the prompt says so.

Complete a four-column table giving two personal examples where you acted according to patterns of irrational or unethical decision-making, naming the patterns, identifying egocentrism, sociocentrism or pathological tendencies of mind involved, and showing how the keys to sound decision-making would have applied.

Analyse two supplied arguments — Jane's insurance claim and an ICU resource allocation case — stating the issue and conclusion of each, classifying it as deductive or inductive, and citing the words and structure that justify the classification.

An exercise that asks you to argue for nothing and doubt nothing — three premises from the side you disagree with, each taken seriously enough that its holder would recognise the account.

A paper of at least three pages responding to Christine Tanner's article on clinical judgment, addressing what you feel are the greatest influences on clinical judgment — experience, knowledge or a combination — and what part intuition plays, including how you will develop nursing intuition, with APA citations if sources are used.

An assignment determining how abstracting the parts of a truth-functional statement forces strict attention to meaning and to the validity of an argument's logic, beginning by reducing the statement that if I ask you to help me out then I need your help, I need your help, so I must be asking for it, into truth-functional symbolic form, and then connecting these skills to the things you will be doing in your professional life.

A discussion post distinguishing vagueness, ambiguity and generality, showing how each is used in politics and law to achieve a desired outcome, and demonstrating them with quoted examples from current events.