Workshop Report: “Teaching all first year students how to reason conditionally

Abstract

Critical thinking is a crucial attribute faculty strive to foster in students. Especially in our
current climate of false narratives and obfuscated data, we want our students to develop
sound reasoning skills and avoid errors in logic that frequently appear in political, social,
business, and academic arguments. This workshop focused on a particular elementary
logical concept known as the implication, or conditional statement. In simple terms, this
concept is exemplified by the statement “If [A] is true then it must be that [B] is true too”.
We demonstrated how this type of reasoning is often difficult to understand for most
people (Inglis & Simpson, 2004). To solve this problem, we engaged in a discussion about
designing activities and content that teaches, both implicitly and explicitly, the logic behind
conditional statements. Research has shown that this type of reasoning is challenging when
applied to abstract and unfamiliar settings, however, by the end of this workshop,
participants took away strategies to teach students these skills in ways all learners can
comprehend and be engaged with.