Paul Blaschko

The development of “critical thinking” is often cited by faculty, students, employers, and administrators as one of the most valuable outcomes of courses in the humanities. However, teaching and assessing these skills is challenging, particularly in large courses, due to the complexity of traditional systems of formal and informal reasoning and the extensive practice required, which is time-intensive to assess. In spring 2021, the instructional faculty of a large lecture course at the University of Notre Dame adopted ThinkerAnalytix, a web-based platform that teaches critical thinking through a mastery-based “argument mapping” course. This intervention aimed to increase the course’s intellectual rigor and improve students’ critical thinking skills. The platform resulted in significant improvements, with average critical thinking pre- and post-test growth of 16% and 12% across two sections. However, its introduction initially caused a notable drop in student satisfaction and did not affect their self-perceived growth. Over the next three semesters, instructors implemented strategies to integrate ThinkerAnalytix more effectively into the course. These efforts successfully maintained gains in critical thinking while mitigating negative perceptions, offering a replicable model for improving critical thinking instruction in large philosophy courses, with potential applications across disciplines.

In this paper we argue that God and the Good Life, a prominent philosophy as a way of life (PWOL) undergraduate course, serves the needs of novices in philosophy classrooms, whether they plan to continue in the study of philosophy or not. We draw from both philosophy and educational psychology in making our case and highlight four distinctive components of God and the Good Life pedagogy at the University of Notre Dame: 1) transformative learning goals, 2) immersive experiences, 3) deep personal connections to students’ everyday lives, and 4) cooperative relationships of mutual support in a community of dialogue. We end with a coda on even wider relevance for PWOL pedagogies in bringing about the pluralistic society we hope for, even in our deeply polarized societal moment.