Teaching Informal Logical Fallacy Identification with a Cognitive Tutor

In this age of fake news and alternative facts, the need for a citizenry capable of critical thinking has never been greater. While teaching critical thinking skills in the classroom remains an enduring challenge, research on an ill-defined domain like critical thinking in the educational technology space is even more scarce. We propose a difficulty factors assessment (DFA) to explore two factors that may make learning to identify fallacies more difficult: type of instruction and belief bias. This study will allow us to make two key contributions. First, we will better understand the relationship between sense-making and induction when learning to identify informal fallacies. Second, we will contribute to the limited work examining the impact of belief bias on informal (rather than formal) reasoning. We discuss how the results of this DFA will also be used to improve the next iteration of our fallacy tutor, how this tutor may ultimately contribute to a computational model of informal fallacies, and some potential applications of such a model.