Critical Reasoning

The learning objectives for this module are to enhance students’ critical and creative reasoning abilities, enabling each thinker to develop the most efficient identification and use of argument in order to determine the truth or validity of any given conclusions. Together with their repeated exposure to novel premise/conclusion sets, multiple representations and reasoned exploration of alternative interpretations of stimulus data (rather than mere descriptions of them), students will come to develop efficient, consistent use of their reasoning skills appropriate to the avoidance of their more natural tendency to draw conclusions based upon unnecessary (and often unwarranted) assumptions. Instead, students will become better able to recognise, categorise, and hierarchically organise, the most critical components of situations, events and relevant data derived from any number of social or academic sources, in order to better process all of the information available to them (to ‘reason through’) for the drawing of excellent conclusions via smart critical reasoning.