Critical thinking across the curriculum (CTAC)

Implementing critical thinking across the curriculum is challenging, involving securing substantial agreement on the nature of critical thinking, areas of prospective application (subject matter? everyday life?), degree of need for a separate course, and the nature of coordination, including leadership, a glossary, selection of courses for incorporation, avoidance of duplication and gaps, acquiring required subject matter, and assessment of the total effort, teaching methods used, and decrease or increase in retention of subject matter

Commentary on: Ilan Goldberg, Justine Kingsbury and Tracy Bowell\u27s Measuring critical thinking about deeply held beliefs

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Definition: A Three-Dimensional Analysis with Bearing on Key Concepts

This essay presents a three-dimensional analysis of definition (form, stance, and content) with application to making and evaluating definitions; teaching how to define; avoiding equivocation with argument and bias ; and, using the concept-conception distinction, avoiding being deterred by the many definitions of critical thinking , and seeing the usefulness of objectivity in everyday arguments in spite of existing conflict and confusion about aspects of objectivity

Defending sole singular causal claims

Even given agreement on the totality of conditions that brought about an effect, there often is disagreement about the cause of the effect, for example, the disagreement about the cause of the Gulf oil spill. Different conditions’ being deemed responsible accounts for such disagreements. The defense of the act of deeming a condition responsible often depends on showing that the condition was the appropriate target of interference in order to have avoided the effect

Correlation and causality

This paper provides an analysis of the argument from cause and effect and a comparison of its various types with the argument from correlation. It will be claimed that arguments from causality and from correlation should be treated as equivalent for argumentative purposes. The main advantages of this approach (theoretical economy and impact on the taxonomy of critical questions) as well as possible theo-retical objections will be discussed

Exploring the Personality of Virtual Tutors in Conversational Foreign Language Practice

Fluid interaction between virtual agents and humans requires the understanding of many issues of conversational pragmatics. One such issue is the interaction between communication strategy and personality. As a step towards developing models of personality driven pragmatics policies, in this paper, we present our initial experiment to explore differences in user interaction with two contrasting avatar personalities. Each user saw a single personality in a video-call setting and gave feedback on the interaction. Our expectations, that a more extroverted outgoing positive personality would be a more successful tutor, were only partially confirmed. While this personality did induce longer conversations in the participants, we found that interactions with both were enjoyed and that user perception of them differed less than intended

Virtual Tutor Personality in Computer Assisted Language Learning

The use of intelligent virtual agents in language learning has increased in recent years. Studies into several aspects of personalisation aiming to increase user engagement are an ongoing research topic with avatar personality being one such aspect. As a step towards our development of intelligent virtual avatars, we present two of our initial experiments to explore differences in user interaction with two contrasting avatar personalities -- P1: open-minded, friendly and sociable and P2: closed-off, curt and distant. Each user interacted with a single personality in a video-call setting and gave feedback on the interaction. Our expectations, that P1 would be rated more enjoyable and induce participants to talk more, were only partially confirmed. While P1 did induce longer conversations in the participants, we found that interactions with both personalities were enjoyed and that user perception of P1 and P2 differed, but less than intended. Several possible causes for these results are discussed, and we outline impacts for follow on intelligent system design