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Course Description Investigating Ideas: Reading, Writing, and the Disciplines is the second course in a required two-semester sequence offered by the English Department. In this general education course, students learn to recognize, analyze, and construct academic arguments. The prerequisite is Academic Reading and Writing. Student population includes many first year students in their second semester, but the course allows for sophomore, junior, or even senior registration, since these students can benefit greatly from the opportunity to build on their critical reading, thinking, and writing skills as they pursue upper-level research in their majors. For our lesson study, we taught the first iteration to a group of 25 students in Dr. Schneider-Rebozo's 9:30-10:45 a.m. section of the course. After reviewing our findings and making extensive changes to the lesson, the second iteration was taught two weeks later to Dr. Schneider-Rebozo's 12:30-1:45 p.m. section of the course together with Dr. Tiedeman's 12:30-1:45 p.m. section, for a total of 50 students. To physically accommodate the space requirements of the combined sections, we reserved a larger classroom in another building and directed students to meet us there on a one-time basis; we then returned to our regular classrooms for the rest of the semester. The classes met for 75 minutes twice a week for fourteen weeks. All regular class meetings as well as the lesson study class meetings were held in technology-enhanced rooms that included networked computers for the instructor and LCD projectors. Our lesson study on logical fallacies is designed to be presented prior to student submission of the final draft of the first major essay project, a project which is comprised of a series of sequenced essay assignments that require a classical academic argument structure. The first iteration of the lesson study occurred at the end of the fourth week of the fourteen week term; this is, in our view, the optimal time for the lesson in Investigating Ideas: Reading, Writing, and the Disciplines. The second iteration of the lesson study occurred at the end of the sixth week of the term; this timing coincided with the second course unit and allowed students in these two sections to recognize fallacious logic and flawed support in all drafts of their second essay project.
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Executive Summary Sound argumentation is the foundation of rigorous critical thinking and ethical writing. This lesson study analyzes ways to improve student awareness and understanding of logical fallacies, and makes explicit the connection between logic and argumentation. Our lesson study team had two main goals in mind: first, to provide students with the critical thinking tools to support them in identifying logical fallacies when they encounter them and, second, to foster student sensitivity in their own rhetoric and writing to the distinction between sound logic and fallacious logic, valid arguments and invalid arguments. The final lesson design incorporated team findings to make substantive changes to virtually every aspect of the lesson. The lesson in its final version includes four parts: a brief introduction including a two-minute comic video clip of the Monty Python skit known as "The Argument Clinic," a small-group analysis of a short student-authored argumentative reading containing multiple fallacies (the "Death" essay, which discusses the death penalty), an interactive PowerPoint to alternate between small- and large-group discussion of five common logical fallacies, and a final individual or small-group worksheet that asks students to label examples of logical fallacies. Our team felt that the logical fallacies lesson study was enormously successful; by the end of the second iteration of the lesson, we all felt that student learning was significantly improved. While students of the first iteration responded courteously and expressed positive feelings about the lesson in post-lesson free-write responses, they also revealed a notable amount of confusion about lesson content and purpose. In the second iteration, students demonstrated greater clarity about the underlying purpose of the lesson, and exhibited greater engagement and a higher rate of success in identifying the commonalities and articulating the logical disjunctions in the examples included in the lesson. Overall, students responded much more positively to the second iteration of the lesson, and we attribute this change to improved content, formatting, and delivery.
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The Study Below is a link to the study of the lesson.
The Study
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