Teaching Critical Thinking and Writing through Debates: An Experimental Evaluation

Abstract

Whitewater Faced with the desire to maintain high standards of scholarship in a context of large introductory level classes and limited resources, the authors experimented with several active learning techniques designed to develop critical thinking and writing skills. The tentative conclusions drawn are that the debateformat in the context of large classes is an effective way to modify students' opinions on social issues and to teach critical thinking and writing skills. Also discussed are several ethical issues involved in teaching critical thinking. BACKGROUND Probably all faculty think that the teaching of critical thinking and writing is a "good thing," just as motherhood and apple pie are good things. The problem, of course, is that unless one has plenty of teaching assistants, the conventional term paper isn't feasible in mass classes of 50, 100, or more because the grading load is simply too high. Moreover, if one has ambitions of having students not only write papers but rewrite them several times during a semester, the grading task becomes virtually impossible. So, perhaps reluctantly, we give up the goals of teaching critical thinking and writing and fall back on lecturing and multiple choice tests. But what if our consciences bother us? Our consciences bothered us, so for over ten years we have tinkered around in a variety * Charles S. Green Ilm was awarded the Hans O. Mauksch Award for Distinguished Contributions to Undergraduate Sociology in 1989 by the ASA Section on Undergraduate Education. Award recipients are required to provide a talk at the following year' s meetings. Green's talk before the 1990 meetings was based on this article. The article is a revised version of a paper presented by both authors to the 1990 annual meetings of the Midwest Sociological Society in Chicago. The authors wish to acknowledge the help their colleagues rendered to this project by grading students' essays: Ronald Berger, Eugene Grigsby, Lanny Neider, Lawrence Neuman, and Richard Salem. We also wish to thank our colleague Patricia Searles as well as Dean Dom and Barbara Sherman Heyl for providing useful comments during various stages of the project, William Rau and Jean C. Karlen for comments during the Midwest meetings, and the three reviewers of this version: Louis E. Anderson, Eugene M. Labovitz, and Norma J. Shepelak. This article was copy edited by Donna Perdue.

The Power of Debate: Reflections on the Potential of Debates for Engaging Students in Critical Thinking about Controversial Geographical Topics

“…Firstly, they had to be prepared to challenge their initial perceptions; secondly, they had to work through the opposing views and look for appropriate arguments; and thirdly, they needed to reflect upon and consolidate the arguments supporting their own perspectives in order for them to continue to believe that asylum seekers should be able to work in the UK. The critical insight and more nuanced responses from the students was in contrast to some of the debate literature which found that debates shaped learner's attitudes, often away from their original perspectives (Green & Klug, 1990;Omelicheva & Avedeyeva, 2008;Kennedy, 2009). Here the majority of students still maintained their original views, but were more tempered in their statements, and nuanced in their reasoning.…”

“…This offers the opportunity to focus upon particular perspectives of issues, but not the same level of 'thinking on your feet' which forms a central part of a debate. Learning to cope with the uncertainty offers the opportunity to develop enhanced written and/or oral communication skills; research skills; analysis, synthesis and evaluation skills; critical thinking skills; argument and persuasion skills (Green & Klug, 1990;Dundes, 2001;Kennedy, 2009). Significantly, these include the development of the higher level cognitive skills of Bloom's Taxonomy (Kennedy, 2009).…”

“…Omelicheva & Avedeyeva (2008, p.606) go as far as to argue that "debates appear to be more effective in developing students' comprehension of complex concepts and application and critical evaluation skills" than lecture based teaching. The method makes it necessary for students to seek reasons to justify their view point by developing such abilities as identifying value assumptions within arguments and judging whether data is misleading or absent (Green & Klug, 1990). This pushes students to evaluate critically the evidence on either side of a debate and creatively build counter arguments.…”

“…The method of debate offers students the opportunity to stimulate development of their critical thinking through encountering students with views contrary to their own, and in doing so, induce them to either change those views or learn to defend their own views with better logic and more substantial evidence (Green & Klug, 1990). Students rarely experience a direct challenge to their ideas, and as such they infrequently have the opportunity to defend their own arguments (Green & Klug, 1990).…”

“…Students rarely experience a direct challenge to their ideas, and as such they infrequently have the opportunity to defend their own arguments (Green & Klug, 1990). The highly engaged atmosphere of a debate supports students to focus on their attitudes and opinions from a particular perspective (Omelicheva & Avedeyeva, 2008).…”