Date of Original Version Abstract or Table of Contents 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 (in both semesters)
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 ov