- Title Pages
- Dedication
- Frontispiece
- Foreword: Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century
- Preface
- I What We Teach and Why
- 1 Why We Need a New Kind of Higher Education
- 2 Practical Knowledge
- 3 Foundations of the Curriculum
- 4 A New Look at General Education
- 5 Multimodal Communications and Effective Communication
- 6 Formal Analyses and Critical Thinking
- 7 Empirical Analyses and Creative Thinking
- 8 Complex Systems and Effective Interaction
- 9 A New Look at Majors and Concentrations
- II How We Teach
- 10 Unlearning to Learn
- 11 The Science of Learning: Mechanisms and Principles
- 12 Fully Active Learning
- 13 A New Team-Teaching Approach to Structured Learning
- 14 Teaching from Lesson Plans
- 15 The Active Learning Forum
- 16 Building Lesson Plans for Twenty-First-Century Active Learning
- 17 Assessing Student Learning
- III Creating a New Institution
- 18 Building a New Brand
- 19 Global Outreach: Communicating a New Vision
- 20 An Admissions Process for the Twenty-First Century
- 21 Multifaceted Acculturation: An Immersive, Community-Based Multicultural Education
- 22 Experiential Learning: The City as a Campus and Human Network
- 23 A Global Community by Design
- 24 Mental Health Services in a Diverse, Twenty-First-Century University
- 25 The Minerva Professional Development Agency
- 26 Accreditation: Official Recognition of a New Vision of Higher Education
- 27 A Novel Business and Operating Model
- Afterword: For the Sake of the World
- Appendix A: Habits of Mind and Foundational Concepts
- Appendix B: Mission, Principles, and Practices
- Editors and Contributors
- Index
Formal Analyses and Critical Thinking
Formal Analyses and Critical Thinking
- Chapter:
- (p.87) 6 Formal Analyses and Critical Thinking
- Source:
- Building the Intentional University
- Author(s):
John Levitt
Richard Holman
Rena Levitt
Eric Bonabeau
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
What treatments should be used for prostate cancer? How likely are people to vote Democratic or Republican in the next U.S. presidential election? How should scarce resources be deployed to help feed the world? These are just a few of the questions that various segments of the populace face daily. Yet, most of us are unable to analyse the available data pertaining to these and other questions in a logical or quantitative fashion in order to make informed decisions. These issues shape how and what we teach in Formal Analyses. An engaged citizenry needs tools such as an understanding of how to identify and unravel logical fallacies, how statistics can both clarify and obfuscate issues and how tools such as risk analysis and game theory can aid in decision making. Our Formal Analyses course arms students with techniques such as logical thinking, formal representation of problems, algorithms and simulations, probability and statistics, and tools for effective decision-making to create discerning consumers of information.
Keywords: Heuristics, inferential statistics, decision making, logical analysis, algorithms
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- Title Pages
- Dedication
- Frontispiece
- Foreword: Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century
- Preface
- I What We Teach and Why
- 1 Why We Need a New Kind of Higher Education
- 2 Practical Knowledge
- 3 Foundations of the Curriculum
- 4 A New Look at General Education
- 5 Multimodal Communications and Effective Communication
- 6 Formal Analyses and Critical Thinking
- 7 Empirical Analyses and Creative Thinking
- 8 Complex Systems and Effective Interaction
- 9 A New Look at Majors and Concentrations
- II How We Teach
- 10 Unlearning to Learn
- 11 The Science of Learning: Mechanisms and Principles
- 12 Fully Active Learning
- 13 A New Team-Teaching Approach to Structured Learning
- 14 Teaching from Lesson Plans
- 15 The Active Learning Forum
- 16 Building Lesson Plans for Twenty-First-Century Active Learning
- 17 Assessing Student Learning
- III Creating a New Institution
- 18 Building a New Brand
- 19 Global Outreach: Communicating a New Vision
- 20 An Admissions Process for the Twenty-First Century
- 21 Multifaceted Acculturation: An Immersive, Community-Based Multicultural Education
- 22 Experiential Learning: The City as a Campus and Human Network
- 23 A Global Community by Design
- 24 Mental Health Services in a Diverse, Twenty-First-Century University
- 25 The Minerva Professional Development Agency
- 26 Accreditation: Official Recognition of a New Vision of Higher Education
- 27 A Novel Business and Operating Model
- Afterword: For the Sake of the World
- Appendix A: Habits of Mind and Foundational Concepts
- Appendix B: Mission, Principles, and Practices
- Editors and Contributors
- Index
