Critical Thinking

Course Description

Critical Thinking helps students examine their individual reasoning and thinking processes, including how personal perspectives and worldviews develop and transform. The curriculum covers argumentation, logical fallacies, credibility assessment, and the connection between critical thinking and effective communication, and explores how cultural context influences underlying assumptions and analytical conclusions.

⚠ The course fulfils Florida State Board of Education Administrative Rule 6A-10.030 requirements for College-Level Communication and Computational Skills — the requirement long known as the Gordon Rule — and supports Associate in Arts degree completion requirements. That makes it materially more useful than an elective of the same size, and it is worth confirming with an advisor how it fits your particular plan.

Within the SCNS taxonomy, SLS is the Student Life Skills prefix. Daytona State publishes this at 3 credits, offered fall and spring, giving approximately 45 contact hours at the standard lecture convention.

The distinctive thing about this course is that it turns the analysis on the student. Most reasoning instruction examines other people's arguments; this one begins with how your own worldview formed and what it makes you likely to accept without checking. That is the harder and more useful half, because motivated reasoning is not something other people do.

Learning Outcomes

Required Outcomes

• Distinguish an argument from an assertion, an explanation, and a description.
• Identify premises and conclusions in ordinary prose.
• Reconstruct an argument in a form that can be evaluated.
• Distinguish deductive validity from inductive strength.
• Evaluate whether premises are true and whether they support the conclusion.
• Identify common formal and informal fallacies.
• Recognise fallacies in your own reasoning, not only in others'.
• Describe cognitive biases and their effect on judgement.
• Describe motivated reasoning and confirmation bias.
• Examine how your own worldview and assumptions formed.
• Describe how cultural context shapes assumptions and conclusions.
• Assess the credibility of a source.
• Distinguish evidence, testimony, and opinion.
• Evaluate statistical and quantitative claims critically.
• Recognise misleading presentation of data.
• Evaluate causal claims and distinguish correlation from causation.
• Assess claims encountered in media and online sources.
• Recognise persuasion techniques and rhetorical manipulation.
• Construct a well-supported argument of your own.
• Anticipate and address objections fairly.
• Represent an opposing position accurately before criticising it.
• Communicate reasoning clearly in writing.
• Change your position when the evidence warrants it.
• Apply critical thinking to a practical decision.

Optional Outcomes

• Describe formal logic notation at an introductory level.
• Describe scientific reasoning and hypothesis testing.
• Describe ethical reasoning frameworks.
• Describe argumentation in legal and policy contexts.
• Describe rhetoric and its legitimate uses.
• Describe reasoning about risk and probability.

Major Topics

Required Topics

• Arguments, assertions, and explanations
• Premises and conclusions
• Reconstructing arguments
• Deduction and induction
• Evaluating truth and support
• Formal and informal fallacies
• Fallacies in your own reasoning
• Cognitive biases
• Motivated reasoning and confirmation bias
• Formation of worldview and assumptions
• Culture and assumption
• Source credibility
• Evidence, testimony, and opinion
• Evaluating quantitative claims
• Misleading data presentation
• Causation and correlation
• Media and online claims
• Persuasion and manipulation
• Constructing an argument
• Addressing objections
• Representing opposing views
• Writing reasoning clearly
• Changing your mind
• Applied decision-making

Optional Topics

• Introductory formal logic
• Scientific reasoning
• Ethical reasoning frameworks
• Legal and policy argument
• Rhetoric
• Reasoning about risk

Resources & Tools

• Your academic advisor — free, and the most under-used resource in higher education. An hour with an advisor before registration saves more time and money than anything else on this list.
• FloridaShines (floridashines.org) — free; the statewide portal for transfer planning, common prerequisites, and the 2+2 pathway between Florida public institutions.
• Florida Department of Education — Statewide Course Numbering System — free; the authority on what transfers and what a course number means.
• Daytona State's student services — tutoring, the writing centre, library instruction, disability services, and counselling, all included in what you already pay.
• O*NET OnLine (onetonline.org) — free; occupation profiles, required skills, and wage data.
• Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook (bls.gov/ooh) — free and authoritative on pay, entry requirements, and projected demand.
• CareerSource Florida and FloridaJobs.org — free Florida-specific labour market data and local workforce services.
• FAFSA and the financial aid office — ask directly about how a course counts toward enrolment status before you register, not after.
• Your college library's database instruction — free, and the fastest route to distinguishing a peer-reviewed source from a persuasive one.
• Primary sources — the single most useful habit this course can leave you with is going to the study, the statute, or the report rather than to an article describing it.

Career Pathways

• The skills here are not tied to one occupation — they are the ones employers name most consistently across every field: communication, reasoning, planning, and self-management.
• Transfer to a Florida public university under the 2+2 articulation agreement — an Associate in Arts guarantees admission to a state university, though not to a specific institution or programme.
• Any Associate in Science pathway — the planning done here shapes which one fits.
• Direct entry to employment — where a certificate or A.S. is the credential, the career planning matters more, not less.
• Apprenticeship and workforce programmes — frequently overlooked, and frequently paid.
• ⚠ Plan the whole pathway, not the next term. The most expensive mistakes in higher education are credits taken that do not count toward the destination.
• ⚠ This is the skill employers name most and teach least. It is not tied to an occupation, and it is what distinguishes performance within every one of them.

Special Information

⚠⚠ Motivated reasoning is not something other people do

• The uncomfortable finding underneath this whole subject is that reasoning ability does not protect against bias — it frequently makes it worse, because a capable reasoner constructs better justifications for what they already believed.
• Notice the asymmetry in your own scrutiny. The practical test: do you check a claim you dislike more carefully than one you like? Nearly everyone does, and noticing it is most of the remedy.
• State the opposing position well enough that someone holding it would agree with your statement before you criticise it. If you cannot, you do not yet understand it.
• Distinguish the argument from the person making it. A correct argument from someone you dislike is still correct.
• Look for what would change your mind. A position that no evidence could revise is not a conclusion, and it is worth knowing which of yours are like that.
• ⚠ Be careful with confident sources. Confidence is not evidence, and the most confident presentation frequently belongs to the least qualified account.
• Check the primary source. A remarkable proportion of widely repeated claims are misdescriptions of something narrower.
• Changing your mind on evidence is the skill, not the failure. It is treated as weakness socially and it is the entire point academically.

⚠ Evaluating claims online — the practical version

• Find the original. Most misleading claims are accurate reports of something that has been stripped of its qualifications on the way.
• Check who benefits from the claim, and who funded the work behind it. That is not disqualifying, but it is relevant.
• ⚠ Watch for the correlation-presented-as-causation move, which is the commonest defect in reported research and frequently introduced by the reporting rather than the study.
• Ask what the sample was. A striking result from a small or unrepresentative sample is not yet a finding.
• Watch for the missing denominator. A raw count without the population it came from can be made to mean almost anything.
• Look at the axis and the scale on any chart. Truncated axes are the standard way to make a small difference look large.
• Distinguish a preprint, a peer-reviewed study, a review, and an opinion piece, and know which you are reading.
• ⚠ Generative AI output is not a source. It is fluent, frequently correct, and confidently wrong in ways that are hard to detect — verify anything it tells you against a primary source before relying on it or citing it.

How Florida course levels affect transfer

The first digit of an SCNS number denotes the year of offering, not transferability. Courses at the 1000 and 2000 levels transfer transparently between Florida public institutions, and 3000 to 4000 is unproblematic since both are upper division. The boundary that actually matters is 2000 to 3000, where lower-division credit generally cannot satisfy an upper-division requirement.

SLS2505 is 3 credits and approximately 45 contact hours, offered fall and spring at Daytona State.

⚠ It satisfies Florida's Rule 6A-10.030 (Gordon Rule) College-Level Communication and Computational Skills requirement and supports A.A. completion — confirm with an advisor how it fits your plan, because that makes it worth more than an equivalent elective.