Content area
Full Text
Thinking Sociologically: A Critical Thinking Activities Manual. 2d ed. Josephine Ruggiero. Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon. 1999. 89 pages. $4.00.
Understanding Social Issues: Critical Thinking and Analysis. 5th ed. Gai Berlage and William Egelman. Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon. 1999. 144 pages. $23.00.
These two critical-thinking workbooks share some characteristics. Each emphasizes active and applied learning. Each attempts to wed criticalthinking skills to sociological analysis more generally. They analyze controversial social issues likely to be of interest to students. However, the books differ in the degree to which they are successful in achieving their goal of using sociology to teach critical thinking.
The small volume, Thinking Sociologically: A Critical Thinking Activities Manual, by Ruggiero, has large ambitions and covers a great deal of territory. The goal of this workbook is to enhance students' critical-thinking skills through a series of patterned exercises involving analysis of a variety of topics of relevance to students (e.g., college-age drinking, date rape, etc.). Each chapter of the book devotes itself to a particular aspect of critical analysis. Chapter 1 focuses on identifying assumptions. Chapter 2 introduces students to the sociological perspective by emphasizing the discipline's focus on generalization and aggregate-level phenomena. Chapter 3 discusses the analytic steps involved in comparing and contrasting. Chapter 4 introduces students to the elements of generalization. Chapter 5 examines the media. Chapter 6 discusses the difference between description and explanation. Chapter 7 instructs students in causal arguments, and Chapter 8 is devoted to prediction. Chapters 9 and 10 discuss the evaluation of evidence, and Chapter 11 focuses on decision-making skills. The final chapter uses sociological insights to predict and shape social change.
Each of these chapters follows a format. First, students are introduced to the critical-thinking skill covered in that chapter with a brief description. Then the chapter takes the reader through a three-step process: "thinking critically" (the reader addresses a question posed on the particular topic at hand, e.g., What are the assumptions underlying the conflict/functionalist perspectives?); "thinking about thinking" (the reader describes the thought processes involved in answering the critical-thinking question); and "applying what you have learned" (this step involves transferring the critical-thinking skills involved to a different issue). The metacognitive element of this teaching approach is very interesting. Those who teach critical-thinking...