ES1531

ES1531 - Critical Thinking and Writing

This course addresses the need to develop engineering students’ critical thinking and communication skills.  As a result, engineering students will ask good questions, think and reason well and be able to convince others when they practice their profession in society.

This course will help students think critically through ideas and communicate them effectively. Relevance to engineering practice will be emphasized. Ideas/claims/assertions/inferences are value driven and their successful communication is structured on sound reasoning and convincing expression.  In the course, students will learn critical thinking skills through interaction with and rigorous analysis of various written texts.  They will assess the ideas of others and develop their own, support them convincingly and convey them effectively in a critique and research paper.

It is a 48 hour module taught over 12 weeks with 2 two-hour tutorials per week.

Objectives

On successful completion of this module, students will be able to:

  • analyze arguments. Content and credibility of texts from various sources will be scrutinized. Students will learn to question and challenge writers’ assertions in terms of the values, assumptions, reasons and evidences and the reliability of sources that support the assertions.  They will also learn to assess/evaluate the claims or opinions of others.
  • exercise rhetorical sensitivity when analyzing or constructing discourse.  Students will learn the rhetorical strategies for expressing/communicating ideas convincingly (e.g. through concession - refutation), and  be able to distinguish fact from opinion,  identify logical fallacies and use hedges or boosters to express possibility or certainty etc
  • declare their claims/inferences, formulate solutions to problems and support them convincingly in a critique and research paper.
  • use the academic conventions involved in the writing up of their assignments

Assessment

  • Continuous Assessment 60%
  • Final Examination 40%

Prerequisites

If students are required to take ES1000, Basic English, and/or ES1102, English for Academic Purposes, they must complete those modules before taking this course.

Preclusions

EG1413, Students who have already read a WP2201 or IEM1201 module, Utown Students cannot bid for ES1531.

Note:

  • FOE students will be exempted from ES1531 if they have successfully completed an ES1501 module. However, they may take the course as an optional course if they choose.

Modular Credits

Four

Workload

0-4-0-3-3