Maralee Harrell

Drawing on the work of Linda Farmer, this article describes a detailed grading grid coupled with a rubric designed for the purpose of assessing argumentative papers. The rubric consists of two main parts: Content and Style. Relying upon Bloom’s taxonomy of learning, the “Content” part of the rubric assesses a student’s understanding of the material, the argument of their paper, and various abilities concerning analysis, synthesis, evaluation, and creation. The “Style” part of the rubric is split into two parts: Clarity and Organization. Coupling this rubric with a grading grid, the author provides an example of a method for the effective grading of argumentative essays.

The word “philosophy” comes from the Greek “philos” (meaning love) and “sophia” (meaning wisdom); thus philosophy literally is the “love of wisdom.” Whatever else philosophy may be, most people agree that it still retains this spirit of its etymological roots, and that when we are engaged in philosophy we are pursuing wisdom for the sake of itself. Wisdom, however, is not the same thing as knowledge or information. We aren’t merely trying to amass list of interesting ideas, or believe anything that sounds good. Wisdom is, at least in part, the reflection on and critical evaluation of what we ourselves and others around us believe about some very heady topics

After determining one set of skills that we hoped our students were learning in the introductory philosophy class at Carnegie Mellon University, we designed an experiment, performed twice over the course of two semesters, to test whether they were actually learning these skills. In addition, there were four different lectures of this course in the Spring of 2004, and five in the Fall of 2004; and the students of Lecturer I were taught the material using argument diagrams as a tool to aid understanding and critical evaluation, while the other students were taught using more traditional methods. We were interested in whether this tool would help the students develop the skills we hoped they would master in this course. In each lecture, the students were given a pre-test at the beginning of the semester, and a structurally identical post-test at the end. We determined that the students did develop the skills in which we were interested over the course of the semester. We also determined that the students who were able to construct argument diagrams gained significantly more than the other students. We conclude that learning how to construct argument diagrams improves a student's ability to analyze, comprehend, and evaluate arguments