Critical Thinking in Environmental Science
EVS 4021, 3 credits, Fall and Spring Semesters
Instructor: Drs. Stephen Humphrey or Ignacio Porzecanski

Course description:

Develop critical thinking and communication skills in the practicing environmental scientist, analyze the strengths and limitations of arguments regarding environmental science, policy andmanagement, and crafting an argument consistent with the scientific method.

Framing: This is the required capstone course for the major in Environmental Science. The course is about the scholarship of integration. By the senior year, Environmental Science majors have acquired comprehensive knowledge in the science and policy tracks and are ready to explore implications of what has been learned, confront conflicts in classical paradigms,and apply knowledge and skills to real-world problems. Students adopting this challenging mode of thinking will be equipped to deal with a high level of complexity and to continue learning and adapting as they gain experience during further academic study and their work lives.

Course objectives : At the end of this course students will be able to:
1. Understand and discipline your thinking in scientific matters: being better able to clearly formulate questions, evaluate evidence, detect assumptions and gaps in data, notice when evidence is ignored, recognize appropriate support from or excessive reliance on conceptual generalizations (theory), ascertain and acknowledge biases driven by beliefs, worldviews, or preferences, weigh the validity of conclusions based on the strength or weakness of evidence, be more willing to discard positions for which there is little or contrary evidence, assign degrees of likelihood to conclusions you are willing to accept and advocate, and prepared to challenge and refute problematic arguments.
2. Be explicitly aware of the scientific process and how you invoke it in your real-time thinking.
3. Formulate and present strong, logical, science-based arguments and evaluate and discuss arguments made by others.
4. Integrate prior knowledge of how biophysical systems work so as to better understand the constraints and opportunities for natural-resource and environmental management.
5. Better understand the crucial role of social processes, communities, and institutions in effective natural-resource and environmental management.
6. Develop a sense of judgment in the specific science topics covered in the course and more generally develop habits of disciplined thinking applicable to other scientific topics.

Course Syllabus, Spring 2008

Reading List