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  "path": "/2026/02/16/crafting-a-critical-thinking-course-that-sticks-with-students-guest-post/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-02-16T14:00:51.000Z",
  "site": "https://dailynous.com",
  "tags": [
    "Teaching",
    "cognitive biases",
    "critical reasoning",
    "critical thinking",
    "data",
    "teaching",
    "Crafting a Critical Thinking Course that Sticks with Students (guest post)",
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  "textContent": "A forthcoming study shows that a critical thinking course focused on a few good, relatively easy to learn, and useful reasoning strategies can impart lessons that remain effective long after the course has ended. The study, authored by Michael Bishop (Florida State), Adam Feltz (Oklahoma), and Paul Conway (Southampton), will be coming out in The Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied. In the following guest post, Professor Bishop describes the course, the motivation for it, the design of the study, and the results. An appendix at the end of the post contains the study’s questions. Crafting a Critical Thinking Course that Sticks with Students by Michael Bishop Two large longitudinal studies conducted by Adam Feltz, Paul Conway, and me suggest that a critical thinking class can promote large and enduring improvements in how students think about important everyday issues. These studies are described in an article forthcoming in The Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied. Background In Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment (2005), JD Trout and I defended the view that good reasoning strategies are reliable, cheap (i.e., easy to use), and useful. We argued that this view, Strategic Reliabilism, provides a powerful framework for evaluating and repairing our epistemic practices. To prove the ameliorative power of Strategic Reliabilism, I revised my critical thinking class. This turned out to be a long-term project. (Thanks, tenure!) I stopped teaching reasoning strategies that were expensive (e.g., expected utility, rules of logic and probability) or of dubious utility (e.g., informal fallacies). And I started teaching good, cheap, and useful reasoning strategies. For the purposes of a critical thinking class, I took good reasoning strategies to be those that tend to produce accurate judgments (for theoretical reasoning) or favorable outcomes given the reasoner’s values (for practical reasoning). The class teaches students to use reasoning strategies for sampling arguments, testimony, the law of large numbers, herd reasoning, overconfidence, mental accounting, confirmation biases, and status quo biases. Here are five examples of good, cheap, and useful reasoning strategies I teach, each with its own rhyming ditty. Causal Rule: Don’t infer causation from correlation. Causal arguments have holes if they don’t have controls. Regression Rule: For events that have a central tendency, recognize that extreme events tend..\n\nThe post Crafting a Critical Thinking Course that Sticks with Students (guest post) first appeared on Daily Nous.",
  "title": "Crafting a Critical Thinking Course that Sticks with Students (guest post)"
}