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Good Evening.
In our introductory physics and astronomy courses, we very often
speak of teaching our students how to think critically and how to
employ valid scientific reasoning. However, despite this lofty
and often stated goal, we seldom if ever actually provide
instruction in critical thinking and logic. Would it not be a
good idea to actually include this material at the very beginning
of the course? An introductory chapter could provide instruction
on how to recognize logical fallacies and how to construct valid
lines of reasoning as they apply in the sciences.
This idea came to me last week while reading the first chapters
of Jeff Bennett and and William Briggs' text "Using and
Understanding Mathematics: A Quantitative Reasoning Approach,
Second Edition" published by Addison-Wesley. It suddenly occurred
to me that we can never expect our students to learn this stuff
unless authors actually include it in their texts and we, the
instructors, actually include it in our classes.
Cheers,
Joe