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In today's information age, obtaining facts is hardly a challenge. In fact, students are surrounded by information: Through online databases, books, articles, newspapers, and more recently through websites, blogs, and social networking interfaces, students have access to unprecedented amounts of information without ever leaving their study rooms. What remains a challenge, however, is the development of the skills that are needed to critique and process this easy-to-obtain information. Critical thinking is described variously, as "the capacity to work with complex ideas whereby a person can make effective provision of evidence to justify a reasonable judgement," as "the shift of learners from absolute conceptions of knowledge towards contextual knowing" and as "an understanding of knowledge as constructed and related to its context" (Moon 2008, 128).1 Previous research demonstrated that critical thinking skills can be developed through a number of activities, including simulation, optical illusion exercise (Hoefler 1994), statistical data analysis (McBride 1996), classroom debates and guest speakers (Cohen 1993), multiple, short exercises (Atwater 1991), analysis briefs (Alex-Assensoh 2008), and electronic discussions (Greenlaw and DeLoach 2003). In the political science classroom, writing assignments and their potential contribution to the development of these skills receive relatively less attention than in other disciplines. A two-stage writing assignment, described in this article, may be an effective way to teach undergraduate students these skills.
We particularly focus on writing assignments for two reasons: First, writing, as "thought on paper,"2 can provide a unique opportunity to develop critical thinking skills, and second, our experience with writing assignments is commonly shared among faculty from across the disciplines. Students rarely pay attention to the feedback that instructors give on graded papers that leads to student repetition of the same mistakes. We advocate a carefully designed writing assignment that provides not only a unique opportunity for students to hone their critical thinking skills, but also provides students with incentive to pay attention to an instructor's feedback. The assignment, used in an introductory level comparative politics course, requires students to apply abstract theories to concrete cases and consists of two papers: a draft and a final. Although essentially asking the same question as in the draft paper, the final paper requires far more than simple editing, which...