TEACHING ARGUMENTATION IN A NATURAL RESOURCE CONTEXT: IMPROVING CRITICAL THINKING SKILLS (ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION, RHETORIC, COGNITIVE PROCESS, HIGHER EDUCATION, LOGICAL)

Integrative management and conflict mediation require that environmental professionals work with people whose values and perceptions differ from their own. Of fundamental importance in these situations are certain critical thinking skills, including the capacity to recognize the value assumptions underlying one's area of expertise and to make and evaluate arguments. Yet such skills are often neglected in undergraduate training of environmental professionals or are presumed to be learned in a philosophy or English course. This presumption assumes, falsely, that universally applicable standards for making inferences exist and ignores the role of knowledge in reasoning.; An experiment to teach certain critical thinking skills to undergraduates in the context of a class in natural resource and environmental policy was conducted. Students (n = 37) who received brief weekly instruction in argumentation and logical fallacies and who applied this instruction in writing weekly papers performed significantly better than controls (n = 81) on an open-ended test requiring evaluation of statements embodying faulty reasoning. Specifically, they were better able to recognize faulty reasoning, use logical principles and terminology to justify their judgments, and use all information given.; Nonetheless, experimental and control group students' similar use of generalizations, value judgments, and personal experience in their evaluations of test items--responses based on the content of the test items rather than their logical form--indicate that prior knowledge and salience of statement content affect one's ability to think critically and thus place constraints on efforts to teach critical thinking. The limits of an emphasis on logical fallacies given both human cognitive processes and the role of specialized knowledge in evaluating real-world arguments are discussed.