Teaching Critical Thinking in the High School Speech Program

Abstract

HE educators' use of the term &dquo;critical thinking,&dquo; not too long ago, was Tbounded by formal logic, the sciences, and mathematics. With the development of the social sciences and increased attention to methodical study of current uses of language, we began to speak of critical thinking about human relations. Speech education, probably through no fault of its own, became involved not only in shaping the physical skills of the youthful talker but also in refining the inevitably associated mental processes that must function if he is to have something coherent to say. When we began to study communication as a science, the speech teacher was challenged to a lifetime of effort to discharge a most difficult duty-teaching his pupils to think more critically about the content and context of his communication.

College Debate and Effective Writing: An Argument for Debate in the Public Administration Curriculum

“…problem-solving, research skills, analytical thinking, open-minded ness, and originality (Beckman, 1947;Bradley, 1959;Burrows, 1940;Callender, 1957;Giffin and Linkugel, 1958;Gunderson, 1961 ;Howell, 1954;Kruger, 1975).…”

“…On tests measuring critical thinking, analysis, and logical reasoning, debaters repeatedly score higher than nondebaters, and this advantage increases with the skill and experience of the debater (Bradley and Mulvaney, 1964;Gruner et al, 1971;Semlack and Shields, 1977). Although it is likely that this correlation results in part from self-selection, several longitudinal studies (Howell, 1943;Huseman et al , 1972) show that students instructed in argumentation and debate show much improvement on such tests, gaining significantly more than their nondebating peers. In one study, for example, Brombeck (1949) tested 202 argumentation students and matched controls at eleven colleges and universities , using a battery of Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Tests (including measures of skill in logical reasoning, inference, discrimination of arguments, and evaluation of arguments) .…”