By Aman Ravishankar (University of Illinois)
Information
One of the most important skills for undergraduate STEM students to possess is critical thinking – the ability to analyze evidence, data, and other factors to come to an informed decision on a topic are highly sought after (Pearl, 2019). One way to promote this critical thinking is through debate activities, in which students construct interacting arguments.
Debates involve more than just presenting an argument – they involve attacking and defending against others’ arguments. We believe this interaction between arguments is the key mechanism through which debate-style activities have resulted in positive learning outcomes in other disciplines, and has the potential to improve students’ critical thinking related to statistics.
We present educational materials and results from a large (N=1099) block randomization study for an asynchronous debate activity to promote students’ critical thinking in evaluating the internal validity of study designs for causal inferences. We used this activity in a large introductory level general education statistics course, with both an in-person and online section.
Students completed training activities in learning how to construct ‘attacking’ and ‘defending’ arguments, and then completed an individual assignment where they constructed debate arguments. We use the example of a professor considering requiring attendance, and provide a real study and example arguments to develop students’ ‘debate’ thinking. Student performance was assessed through multiple choice assessments as well as rubric-based scores on their arguments.