Components of Critical Thinking
Critical thinking skills have become the focus of a growing body of research in recent years (Borg & Stranahan, 2010), due in large part to the flood of information that is now available and the need to analyze and interpret this information to identify flawed reasoning (Halpern, 2009; Hummell, 2016). To this end, this paper applies all of the eight steps recommended by the U.S. Army Management Staff College's critical thinking model developed by Dr. Ron Paul as disseminated by Eichhorn (n.d.) to assess selected arguments made in a memorandum to the board of directors of Penn-Mart concerning its health care strategy by highlighting the fallacies identified by Almossawi (2013) in his book, An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments. Finally, a summary of the research and important findings concerning the application of critical thinking skills to identify fallacious reasoning are presented in the conclusion.
Review and Analysis
According to the definition provided by Cantu (2015), critical thinking skills "involve the active and deliberate application of higher-order thinking in order to solve a given problem or given situation" (p. 4). The eight steps recommended by the U.S. Army Management Staff College that are based on research by Dr. Ron Paul are set forth and applied to a memorandum dated August 6, 2016 to the Penn-Mart board of directors from Salvador Monella, senior vice president of human resources (hereinafter "the Monella memorandum"), who makes several points concerning the proposed revisions to the organization's health care benefit strategies that can be regarded as fallacious, in Table 1 below.
Table 1
Eight steps to critical thinking applied to the Monella memorandum
Step
Description
Application to Monella Memorandum
Purpose, Goal, or End in View
Whenever we reason, we reason to some end, to achieve some objective, to satisfy some desire, or fulfill some need. One source of problems in student reasoning is traceable to defects at the level of goal, purpose, or end. If the goal is unrealistic, for example, or contradictory to other goals the student has, if it is confused or muddled in some way, the reasoning used to achieve it is problematic.
The purpose of the Monella memorandum was to provide board members with an "update on our efforts to review and revise Penn-Mart's healthcare benefits strategy."...
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