The foundational thinking skills students need for academic success and productive disagreement.
A research-backed, custom-designed course that teaches the habits of mind behind strong critical thinking. Students develop these habits through focused practice, immediate feedback, and a visual approach to understanding arguments.
Building the habits of mind that help students listen deeply, think clearly, and engage respectfully with others.
The habits of mind needed to understand and evaluate arguments for strength and truth.
The habits of mind needed to make disagreement constructive rather than combative.
Want to learn more about the program? Book a 20 minute demonstration with a team member on your own schedule. All demonstrations include extra time at the end for Q&A.
Faculty report measurable learning gains, stronger classroom discourse cultures, and return to the course year after year (93% retention rate).
Shared reasoning and discourse habits develop through repeated, focused practice in a purpose-built environment which is productive and that supports sustained engagement and clear communication.
Assign the course with no additional instruction or grading. All explanations, examples, assessments, and feedback are built in, with seamless LMS integration.
Students practice as much as they individually need to reach proficiency. The platform adapts to what each student has already achieved.
Developed and refined with faculty who have taught critical thinking using innovative, research-backed methods for decades.
Repeated practice with our tools makes strong reasoning and fair interpretation habitual.
A research-backed process to make reasoning visual and expose hidden assumptions.
A step-by-step method to engage an opposing viewpoint with precision and in context.
Independent studies show that The Course has significant, measurable effects on student learning and classroom culture. Students become “more charitable, more fair-minded, better at evaluating not only the positions of others but their own positions as well.”
A longitudinal study at NCSU reports that students who completed the Thinker Course improved their scores by nearly 17% compared to the baseline.
Students who completed both the Thinker Course and an in-person critical thinking course improved their scores by 22 points, a more than two letter-grade improvement.
Large lecture-style courses at Notre Dame show similar results. Both Section 1 (t(142) = 7.314, p < .0001) and Section 2 (t(135) = 9.676, p < .0001) showed significant gains from pre- to post-test.
Instructors and TAs also observed substantial improvements in student's ability to articulate and defend their positions, both in writing and discussion.
"I feel like I switched from being a passive listener to an active one because this course was like a cool toolkit to deconstructing arguments and putting my own thoughts into it."
The Thinker Course is modularized to fit a variety of college courses and programs. See how students plan to apply what they learned from our core modules Analysis and Assumptions.
Daily disagreements and conversations.Debates with peers, friends, and colleagues.Navigating opinions on college campuses.Professional arguments and project defenses.Media literacy and evaluating online information.Essay writing and argumentative papers.Analyzing readings and literature.LSAT preparation.Professional communication.Philosophy coursework.
