Critical Thinking Assignments
Goals of the Critical Thinking Assignments
Like the writing assignments, the critical thinking assignments give us an additional basis on which to assign your final course grade. Also like the writing assignments, the critical thinking assignments are meant to encourage you to think more deeply about certain important concepts in psychology and thereby help you to learn about those concepts. Most important, though, is that these assignments force you to think critically about these concepts--to identify arguments and to evaluate the evidence for and against them. There is no guarantee that anything you read in a psychology textbook or journal article (or in a newspaper or that you see on television) is true. (In fact, there may be a guarantee that much of it is false). For this reason, the ability to separate the plausible and the likely from the implausible and the unlikely is an important one for an educated person to have.
Preliminaries
In lecture on Wednesday, January 24, we will discuss the nature and role of critical thinking in psychology and in life. In preparation, you should read the first three chapters (pp. 1-31) of The Critical Thinker (TCT). Then in section on Thursday, January 25, you will practice your critical thinking skills by completing some of the exercises in TCT.
Instructions and Grading Criteria
During the rest of the term, you will complete three critical thinking assignments. For each assignment, you will use the methods discussed in TCT to identify an argument in the textbook or a supplementary reading, analyze that assertion for understanding, and evaluate the assertion. Specifically, for each one you will write answers to the questions in Tables 3.1 and 3.5 of TCT. Each critical thinking write-up should be one to two typed, double-spaced pages, with reasonable margins.
The very best critical thinking assignments will be complete (i.e., will address every question in Tables 3.1 and 3.5), will describe factual information completely and correctly, will report evidence both for and against an assertion (if it exists), will demonstrate some creativity (e.g., when it comes to evaluating the importance of an argument or coming up with alternative theories), and will be competently written.
Suggested Topics
To get you started, several potential topics (along with the approximate textbook pages) are listed below. Remember, though, that these are general topics and not necessarily "arguments" as defined in TCT. Gray does, however, present at least one interesting argument in discussing each of these topics. You are also free to identify arguments not associated with any of these topics, but if you do you should indicate where (by page number) in the textbook or supplementary reading the argument is made.
Critical Thinking Assignment 1 (Due 2/13)
"Tryon's Classic Study of Maze Learning" (pp. 65-67)
Any hypothesis in the article "The Strategies of Human Mating"
Critical Thinking Assignment 2 (Due 3/19)
Any classical conditioning phenomenon (pp. 126-130)
Any operant conditioning phenomenon (pp. 135-141)
The concept of drug tolerance (pp. 196-198)
The concept of homeostasis (pp. 203-204)
Roles of the lateral or ventromedial hypothalamus (pp. 206-208)
"Some Problems in Dieting" (pp. 211-212)
The Yerkes-Dodson Law (pp. 230)
Peripheral feedback theories of emotion (pp. 231-236)
Critical Thinking Assignment 3 (Due 4/11)
Weber's, Fechner's, or Stevens's Power Law (pp. 276-280)
Any visual illusion (pp. 313-317)
Selective listening or viewing (pp. 300-302)
"Automatization of Perception" (p. 304-305)
Any aspect of the modal model (pp. 327-336)
Explicit vs. implicit memory (pp. 359-364)
The existence of g vs. separate abilities (pp. 375-377)