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James Madison Tests of Critical Thinking are powerful assessments designed to evaluate the in-depth critical thinking ability of middle school students
through adults. These comprehensive tests covers all skills tested by the Watson-Glaser
Critical Thinking Appraisal, California Critical Thinking Skills Test, and Cornell Critical
Thinking Test Level Z—plus 24 additional skills.
Both forms can be used a pretest or posttest. Each test measures the same specific thinking skills (see below), but not with the same item numbers. Additional items
include necessary and sufficient conditions and more emphasis on informal fallacies
and unstated premises/conclusions than any other nationally available test.
Each Form is a 55-item, 50-minute
test that can be administered online, over a network, or on a stand-alone computer.
The James Madison Critical Thinking Course engages students in captivating crime-related scenarios to develop essential critical thinking skills. The step-by-step lessons and activities are easy to use and help students transfer these vital skills throughout academia and life.
The James Madison Critical Thinking Course teaches more than 65 critical thinking related skills and concepts that will improve academic performance across the curriculum:
- Interpret and apply complex texts, instructions, illustrations, etc.
- Recognize and clarify issues, claims, arguments, and explanations.
- Distinguish: conclusions, premises (reasons), arguments, explanations, assumptions (stated/unstated), issues, claims (statements), suppositions, unstated conclusions, unstated premises and implications.
- Recognize ambiguity and unclearness in claims, arguments, and explanations.
- Distinguish necessary and sufficient conditions.
- Describe the structure or outline of arguments and explanations: confirmation, disconfirmation.
- Evaluate whether an inductive argument is strong or weak.
- Evaluate claims and arguments in terms of criteria such as: consistency, relevance, support.
- Evaluate analogical arguments and inductive generalization arguments in terms of criteria, such as: the greater the number of similarities between the conclusion and the premises regarding the sample, the stronger the argument.
- Assess the relevance of claims to other claims, and to questions, descriptions, representations, procedures, information, directives, rules, principles, etc.
- Evaluate whether a deductive argument is valid or invalid (logical form): categorical, truth-functional, and semantic/definitional.
- Distinguish supporting, conflicting, compatible, and equivalent claims, arguments, explanations, descriptions, representations, etc.
- Identify and avoid errors in reasoning, informal fallacies: begging the question, equivocation, post hoc, ergo propter hoc (after that, therefore, because of that), false dilemma/false dichotomy fallacy (line drawing fallacy, perfectionist fallacy), smoke screen/red herring/rationalizing, hasty generalization, appeal to ridicule/sarcasm, ad hominem fallacy (personal attack, poisoning the well), appeal to illegitimate authority, loaded question, evidence surrogate, stereotyping , appeal to consequences (favorable or unfavorable), "wishful thinking", genetic fallacy, biased generalization, anecdotal evidence.
- Discern whether pairs of claims are consistent, contrary, contradictory, or paradoxical.
The book includes teaching suggestions and answers. No previous
background in logic is required to teach these activities.
Note: The James Madison Test of Critical Thinking Forms A and B provide a direct assessment of skills covered in the course book.
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