...COURSE DESCRIPTION Develops ability to identify, analyze, and evaluate reasoning in everyday discourse. Examines the elements of good reasoning from both a formal and informal perspective. Introduces some formal techniques of the basic concepts of deductive and inductive reasoning. Promotes reasoning skills through examining arguments from literature, politics, business, and the media. Enables students to identify common fallacies, to reflect on the use of language for the purpose of persuasion, and to think critically about the sources and biases of the vast quantity of information that confronts us in the "Information Age." INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS Required Resources Soomo (2013). Critical Thinking. [Webtext]. Asheville, NC: Soomo Publishing. Note: For each week of the course, all of the following materials in the Preparation and Evaluation portions can be accessed through the Webtext link within Blackboard. The Activities portion (discussion question) will not be located in Webtext, but rather in a separate Blackboard link within your shell. Supplemental Resources Critical Thinking Community. (2013). Defining Critical Thinking. Retrieved from http://www.criticalthinking.org/pages/defining-critical-thinking/766 Ellerton, P. (2011). Reason to Think. Issues, (95), 33-35. ETS. (2013). Introduction to the Argument Task. Retrieved from http://www.ets.org/gre/revised_general/prepare/analytical_writing/argument/ Holyoak, K., & Morrison, R. G. (2005)...
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...up into four multiple-choice tests and one optional essay. The multiple-choice tests are: English, Mathematics, Reading and Science Reasoning. First, The English test is given, which includes five passages with 15 questions each, for a total of 75 multiple-choice questions that you must answer in 45 minutes.The passages cover a variety of subjects, ranging from historical discussions to personal narratives.The portions of each passage are underlined,...
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...patients like Christianity look for conservative healing to balance a quantity of practices in their faith the same as prayer, loyalty, and meditation. In the majority case as observes the viewpoint to curing and health care stipulation, Baha’i, Sikh, and Buddhist, now as Christians, contain a position for up to date medicine, and scientific practice as a balancing explanation to spiritual interference in moment of sick wellbeing. In this essay I will establish, patients hardly ever mind while they search for care from providers with unusual religious propensity for as long as those providers put the patient’s attention at the forefront. Health care professionalism stress that providers permit patients to illustrate from their personal religious practice and to be responsive toward such necessities of individual patients. This essay attempt to evaluate the faith system of Baha’i, Sikh, and Buddhism, their religious, their religious insight on curing, health enthusiastic and mechanism of their medicinal put into practice. This essay also will evaluate the perspectives through the leading Christian viewpoint of belief and curing. The essay is based on research of three different beliefs, the spirit currently being to institute patients necessitate while cared on behalf of providers with conflicting beliefs certainty and how they fare among individuals providers who achieve the common perspective of belief as intricate hear above. Health care providers in contemporary...
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...Conflicting Viewpoints Essay Andrea Counts Professor Lincoln Schreiber Critical Thinking May 3, 2015 Capital punishment, or the death penalty, is the punishment for a crime by death ("legal definition of capital punishment," n.d.). It is usually administered via the use of lethal injection for heinous crimes such as murder and other serial offenses. I am a defendant of capital punishment for several different reasons, which are detailed in this assignment. One of the main premises that support my position as a defendant of the death penalty is the separation of church and state ("Should the death penalty be allowed?" n.d.). Many opponents of the death penalty contend that it is an immoral act, as it essentially murder and that murder is inherently wrong. This viewpoint is flawed due to the fact that the United States is a country that believes in separation of church and state. Murder is a sin in many religions, but religion cannot play a role in how punishment for crime is carried out, nor is there anything in the constitution asserting that the death penalty as a form of punishment is against any civil liberties afforded to the citizens of this country. The death penalty is reserved for and carried out on the worst of the worst ("Should the death penalty be allowed?" n.d.). I agree with this premise and it goes back to my original statement in which I said the death penalty is used as punishment for those who have committed heinous crimes. There are those who...
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...Assignment 1.1: Conflicting Viewpoints Essay - Part I Prewriting Antonio Smith Professor Erin DiCesare PHI 210 Critical Thinking April 20, 2015 Drinking Age Should the drinking age be lowered from 21 to 18 years old? I think that the drinking age should be lowered to 18 years old. There are some interesting subjects that oppose my thinking that can be argued to be true. First, lowering the drinking age would be medically irresponsible. Second, lowering the drinking age would give high school and middle school students easier access to alcohol. Third, lowering MLDA 21 to 18 will irresponsibly allow a greater segment of the population to drink alcohol in bars and nightclubs. It would be medically irresponsible to lower the age limit from 21 to 18 years old to legally drink or purchase alcohol. There are studies that show alcohol consumption can interfere with the growth and development of a young adult brain’s frontal lobes. The frontal lobes are essential for functions such as emotional regulation, planning, and organization. The potential for chronic problems such as greater vulnerability to addiction, dangerous risk-taking behavior, reduced decision-making ability, memory loss, depression, violence, and suicide is greater when drinking at an early age. [1][2][3][4] What’s interesting about this view is that the brain is still growing and effected by early drinking. If I was to look from this angle I would understand that younger people already have a hard time planning...
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...and job responsibilities, are often in a crossroad of a range of competing interests. Often, the tension may be between the practitioner’s own values and the culture of the organization. In other cases, it may be a conflict between the practitioner’s professional code of ethics and organizational norms and expectations. In yet other circumstances, they may be faced with competing interests between the organization and its various publics. At the very least, practitioners will frequently confront contradictions between business demands for economic performance and public expectations for ethical conduct. Concerns over these competing responsibilities and the ethical dilemmas they produce for public relations are the subject of this essay. In it, a range of challenges faced by public relations practitioners related to issues of ethics and corporate social responsibility (CSR) are explored. It is argued that CSR has, in many respects, altered the expectations and demands placed on the profession. As a profession, public relations have a long and contested relationship with ethics and more recently with corporate social responsibility (McBride 1989, pp. 5-20). Nevertheless, public relations has been regarded as a young profession that lacks core principles to guide ethical, responsible practices that cut across organizational and cultural boundaries (Olasky 1985, pp. 43-49; Rampton & Stauber 2001; Stauber & Rampton...
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...____ A students learning will not be wholly successful without the development of critical thinking. Critical thinking is considered a process of applying coherent and meticulous thinking to a subject (Kurland 2005). In Australian Universities, students are expected to think actively and not just accept everything that is seen or heard. Students must develop more reasoned arguments and focus on the process of learning rather than just attaining information. In this essay, I will discuss what critical thinking is, the skills and attributes of a critical thinker and why critical thinking is important to students’ success in university learning. I will identify what skills are expected of university students and how these skills can be applied to university learning to be successful. I will do so by drawing on relevant materials and my personal experience of SSK12 Introduction to University Learning. Maiorana (1992, 60) describes the purpose of critical thinking as ‘achieving understanding, evaluating viewpoints and solving problems’. In the context of university learning, critical thinking describes skills that contribute to effective study and learning. According to Foundation for Critical Thinking (2009), “Critical thinking is that mode of thinking - about any subject, content, or problem - in which the thinker improves the quality of his or her thinking by skill-fully taking charge of the structures inherent in thinking and imposing intellectual standards upon them” (A Definition...
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...Assignment 1.2: Conflicting Viewpoints Essay - Part II Kadisha Blaylock Professor Sliben Critical Thinking January 17, 2016 There is no requirement for a civilized society to endure the kind of gun-related brutality that Americans appear to acknowledge as ordinary. The answer for gun-related wrongdoing isn't further outfitting general society. It includes establishing thorough firearm control laws that preclude numerous types of weapon possession, essentially shortening or dispensing with access to and the capacity to buy weapons, and actualizing programs in which the administration takes or buys unlawful weapons as of now available for use among the general population. For those guns that are lawful, possession should be fixing to personal investigations, as well as to broad and compulsory preparing in the protected use and capacity of weapons. In a time of compelling worry about national security, Americans need to perceive that one of the best dangers to national security is their own particular intensely equipped populace. Lamentably, our demonstrated failure to handle boundless firearm possession proposes unequivocally that the best approach to do this is to profoundly limit access to and responsibility for sorts of weapons. More gun control leads to fewer suicides. Between 1999 and 2013 there were 270,237 firearm suicides in the United States, accounting for about 52% of all suicides during those years. By Mar. 2014 study distributed in the International Review...
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...English 1020-L22 November 3, 2013 Cultural Analysis-“From Silence to Words: Writing as Struggle” “From Silence to Words: Writing as Struggle” is an essay written by Min-Zhan Lu, in which she describes the effects, both positive and negative, she experienced while trying to obtain somewhat of a balance, between the learning techniques and language forced on to her and her sisters by their parents, and the education and language taught and enforced by their country, China. Lu describes the emotional strain, confusion, and the political persecution she experienced, beginning at the young, tender age of four years old, the year after the Communist Revolution of 1949. For many years, the only memories Lu had were of the many hardships she faced during the years of getting her education, which made it difficult to recall the benefits of her education. While writing this essay, Lu was forced to reflect over these particular years of her life and the effects it had on her, both good and bad. She finally realized that as hard as it was to endure these hardships, personal benefits resulted from these difficult times as well. Lu explains her revelation by stating, “My understanding of my education was so dominated by memories of confusion and frustration that I was unable to reflect on what I could have gained from it” (148). One of the benefits Lu gained was growth, in both her reading and writing skills, by persevering through the confusion and frustration during that time. ...
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...How to Conduct Academic Research Students and professionals both know that conducting accurate, valid, and timely research into academic topics such as history, literature, or anthropology is critical to success in the classroom and at work. Writing the results into a paper is also a major step in the process. Here are some basic steps in performing secondary research. 1. Determine your research topic/question. In some classes, students are told to find a topic; this means the exercise is for the purpose of learning the research process. In other situations, the required topic is clearly indicated from the class, your own work, or your professional needs. Your topic can be aroused from a sense of curiosity, hunch and interest over a particular perceived problem that you feel needed to be filled in the gap of knowledge. 2. Understand the difference between primary and secondary research. a. Primary research means doing original research, meaning that this knowledge doesn't appear in any other paper. You might be reading through original treaties, newspaper articles, or authentic letters from authors or statesmen. You might be conducting scientific, medical or engineering experiments. b. Secondary research, the focus of this wikiHow article, means reading other experts' published papers to learn something new about your topic, to survey what others have said and written about it, to reach a conclusion about your ideas on the topic. 3. Determine your scope...
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...There is a lot to be gained from studying a topic in psychology from more than one perspective. Psychology is a subject which is based on theory and uses various scientific methods to both collect and analyse data. There are many different psychological perspectives adopted by psychologists who take different viewpoints from each other, even though the topic they are interested in is the same. This essay aims to address the question that there is a lot to be gained from studying a topic in psychology from more than one perspective, by looking at the topics of language and meaning from the perspectives of the social constructionists, evolutionary psychologists and cognitive psychology. And the topic of the psychology of sex and gender from the perspectives of social constructionists, evolutionary psychology, biological psychology and psychodynamic psychology. One advantage of studying a topic in psychology from various different perspectives is that each perspective has a different "object of knowledge” and therefore the questions that each perspective will pose, the evidence they collect and the methods they use to collect that evidence will be different. Which in turn causes each perspective either to conflict, coexist or complement each other? If we look at the topic of the psychology of sex and gender from a social constructionist perspective, the object of knowledge we would be concentrating or interested in is that of the social and cultural context of how sex...
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...CONFLICTING VIEWPOINTS ESSAY PART ONE ANTHONY ORTIZ DR. BYRON P WESS CRITICAL THINKING APRIL 16, 2015 For my assignment I chose “Should adults have the right to carry a concealed handgun.” My position on this issue is such that we have the right to defend ourselves and the right to bear arms. Which it does state in the second amendment the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed. In today’s world we have too many victims who were preyed upon by criminals who felt superior because they believed themselves stronger. A premise that opposes my position is “Permitting concealed handguns increases crime.” What’s interesting about this view is that studies have shown that in the past few year’s crimes in rape, aggravated assault, robbery, auto theft, burglary, and larceny involving a concealed handgun have risen dramatically. What’s helpful about this view is it point out the fact that we avoid talking about concealed handguns laws when debating what to do about the roughly thousands of Americans that are murdered by gunfire each year. What I noticed if I were to believe this view is the number of the criminals able to walk the streets with a concealed handguns because of such state laws grant them permission. More guns create more opportunies for injury and death, not fewer. The sense that this condition might make this idea true is the research shows that it is more likely to reduce a person’s chance of being injured during a crime than various other forms...
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...Philip Lee Joor Baruah Monday- 11:15-12:30 Film 20A 30 October 2014 Citizen Kane Sequence Analysis Essay Mise-en-scene, cinematography and editing are visual elements in film that create meaning in the shots/sequences of the film. Ultimately it is these factors that can establish narrative agents and their relations, drive the narrative and place the view in a certain point of view of the narrative. Orson Welle’s 1941 film, Citizen Kane, is considered significant for its technical innovations with its use of deep focus lenses, low angles, high contrast lighting, long takes and dissolves. In my essay I will be analyzing the sequence depicting Kane’s “Declaration of Principles.” I will show how the elements of mise-en-scene, the cinematography and editing choices help to visually depict Kane as a powerful subject, establish narrative conflict and create perspective within the sequence. Through sequence of Kane’s “Declaration of Principles” Kane is depicted as a powerful narrative agent through social blocking in the sequence’s mise-en- scene. Throughout the long third shot, Kane is placed centrally and stands the tallest compared to Leland and Bernstein. Through the cinematic use of deep focus lenses that manages to capture Leland, Kane and Bernstein positioned in the background, mid ground and foreground all in focus at the same time. This allows for Kane to dominate the mise-en-scene in spatial relations to his friends. His physical relations to his friends and the surrounding...
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...“Cathedral” is a first person story about a narrator, his wife and a blind man named Robert who is close friends with the narrator’s wife. The narrator remains unnamed throughout the story, who is a jealous, insecure and close-minded man which is basis of the main theme in this story. According to Clugston, 2014, “The narrator, a self-absorbed person, admits his own “blindness” (lack of insight) about blind people. He doesn’t like the fact that Robert and his wife are close friends” (p.145). I believe the main theme here is insecurity, ignorance and irony. A theme is “an idea, or message, that lies behind a literary work” (Clugston, 2014, p. 117). The narrator is insecure about the relationship between his wife and Robert. In the essay, “Cathedral” by Bill Delaney, he writes about how the narrator is jealous of Robert because of his former relationship with his wife and how he is insecure knowing that his wife has probably told Robert about his faults (Delaney, 2004). I believe that the narrator shows his ignorance by mocking Robert with comments such as, “Maybe I could take him bowling” (Clugston, 2014, p.145). The irony in this story is that despite the narrator’s insecurity and ignorance, he is able to see from Robert at the end of the story. The main character in this story is the narrator, which is the main basis of the theme. “Characters carry out the action of the plot and in doing so they come alive as individuals” (Clugston, 2014, p.64). Throughout the story...
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...Firstly, this question needs to be broken down and understood. The first thing that must be understood is the definition of robust. Robust for me, and this essay, is that robust is going to mean a large and solid amount of something and in this case it is describing knowledge. Therefore this knowledge will be very vast and also understood to a good degree. Though more importantly what is consensus and what is disagreement? Consensus and disagreement are easily two sides of a coin. Consensus being agreement upon an idea by a group of people. While disagreement being a conflicting group of ideas between people. Both may be necessary for robust knowledge or just one may be. For, each allows the knowledge of a topic to be further developed and...
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