The CEA Forum - Summer/Fall 2007 - THINKING IN A DISCIPLINE: AN ASSIGNMENT IN A CRITICAL THINKING CLASS

Oct 15, 2026

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An instructor presents a staged critical-thinking assignment used in a fall 2006 sophomore course, designed to challenge advanced writers while supporting students needing foundational writing practice. The workflow moves from a major-discipline thinking exercise, to drafts using classical argument to analyze the origin of students’ thinking about a controversial disciplinary passage, followed by revision and optional conference feedback for a final portfolio. The design draws on Gerald Nosich’s critical thinking framework, converting each element into discipline-based questions and emphasizing paragraph-length passage analysis.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryExam

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Pages7

Reading Time18 min

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The CEA Forum Summer/Fall 2007

THINKING IN A DISCIPLINE: AN ASSIGNMENT IN A CRITICAL THINKING CLASS

Course Context and Assignment Rationale

Four Stages of the Assignment

Using Nosich’s Critical Thinking Elements

Finding and Using a Disciplinary Passage

Thesis Structure and Common Pitfalls

Addressing Glitches and Reordering Elements

The CEA Forum Summer/Fall 2007: 36.2 THINKING IN A DISCIPLINE: AN ASSIGNMENT IN A CRITICAL THINKING CLASS Matthew A. Fike This paper reports on a challenging and effective assignment on thinking in a discipline that I gave during fall 2006 in my sophomore-level “Critical Reading, Thinking, and Writing” (CRTW) course at Winthrop University. Required of all students, the course follows Writing 101: Composition; and a multi-disciplinary course about the self entitled “The Human Experience: Who Am I?,” which is taught by faculty from a variety of departments and billed as “a course requiring a significant amount of writing." With a big time gap after the former and uneven writing instruction in the latter, CRTW students' writing skills range from remedial to highly advanced. The challenge for the instructor is obvious: how to create assignments that challenge and engage the best students without losing those who need basic-level writing instruction. A reasonable compromise between rigor and accommodation is to give assignments that hover somewhere near the top of the difficulty scale but include multiple opportunities for students to develop and improve their work—in a word, staging. My assignment in thinking in a discipline requires that students put their projects through four stages: an exercise on thinking in their majors; a draft of a paper that uses the classical argument to explore the origin of their ability to think in a specific way about a key passage from their disciplines; a second draft; and (for some of them) a conference and a further revision for the final portfolio. The assignment relies heavily on the elements of critical thinking in Gerald Nosich's Learning To Think Things Through: A Guide to Critical Thinking Across the Curriculum (2nd ed. ) and encourages connections to paired texts in the original iteration of the university's CRTW course: Francis Fukuyama's Our Posthuman Future and Matt Ridley's Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters. I will describe the assignment in detail and illustrate it with an example from the English major—Hamlet's “To be or not to be speech.” First, let us be clear about how Nosich's critical thinking manual relates to the assignment. He writes,“Learning to think from the point of view of a discipline is one of the most valuable outcomes a course in the discipline can provide” (58) . My course is not in anyone's “discipline”—there is no such thing as a major in critical thinking—but students start out by applying the elements of critical thinking to their major fields as a whole. Using Nosich's“visualization” (63-64), they imagine themselves on a journey down a walking path on which they encounter each element of their major fields—purpose, question at issue, assumptions, point of view, context, information, implications and consequences, conclusions, and alternatives. Nosich believes that “Critical thinking lives in questions”(33), and each element translates into a question. For example, one might ask,“What is the purpose of psychology?” Answering questions about a discipline as a whole is a necessary prerequisite for analyzing the origin of one's thinking ability about a passage within that discipline. The next step is to find a passage that illustrates thinking in a discipline: students should mention it in the introduction and in the thesis and quote it fully in the background paragraph. Some students assumed that aone- or two-sentence quotation would be sufficient, and I had to drill into them the need for a passage of paragraph length, one that would take up most of a page. The passage must be controversial, not merely factual; and students must mention it—or some important concept from it—in every single paragraph in order to help unify the paper. I prefer one substantial statement, but my dance major who wrote about Martha Graham successfully linked a series of short quotations in order to achieve the required length and complexity. Here

FAQs

What problem does the instructor face when teaching critical reading, thinking, and writing?

The instructor needs assignments that challenge and engage strong students without losing those who require basic-level writing instruction, given uneven writing preparation across CRTW students.

What are the four stages of the assignment in thinking in a discipline?

Students complete: (1) an exercise on thinking in their majors, (2) a first draft using classical argument tied to a disciplinary passage, (3) a second draft, and (4) for some students, a conference and further revision for a final portfolio.

How does Nosich’s framework influence the assignment’s structure?

Students apply critical thinking elements from Nosich’s manual, using visualization to encounter elements such as purpose, question at issue, assumptions, point of view, context, information, implications and consequences, conclusions, and alternatives, which are treated as questions guiding the paper.

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by SANS