the impact of argument mapping on critical thinking: student’s perceptions in perspective

It is clear that higher education places a large emphasis on the development of critical thinking skills. argument-mapping tools are also designed to help a user visualize the premises and conclusions of arguments in a graph structure, and display a sequence of connected arguments chained together to support an ultimate conclusion. the purpose of this study was to promote critical thinking knowledge, skills, and dispositions, as well as to determine whether students perceptions of critical thinking knowledge, skills, and dispositions had improved, allowing them to transfer those skills across academic disciplines and into their personal and professional lives. mixed methods approach was employed in this research. students were specifically taught how to develop argument maps in order to improve their argument analysis abilities and also encouraged to evaluate and modify the premise, structure, support, and logic of their own written arguments through repeated individual and collaborative practice. they were also given practical tools for evaluating the validity of arguments presented in the text as well as in a variety of editorials and media images. findings showed that purposeful implementation of the above-named interventions could strengthen students’ perceptions of critical thinking and of their own critical thinking abilities.