Research suggests that thinking skills that are core outcomes of academic programs are acquired via implicit learning. In their analysis of the learning and cognitive change directly attributable to the college experience, Pascarella and Terenzini (1991) found that while freshmen and seniors differed somewhat on the amount of explicit knowledge they had in a domain (e.g., knowledge of history), the greatest differences between them were related to critical thinking, including the use of reflective judgment, reasoning to solve ill-structured problems, and the ability to deal with conceptual complexity. These three skills are abilities that enable individuals to establish an organized set of links among concepts in a way that enables them to solve problems. Research on tacit knowledge (see Reber, 1993; Cleeremans, 1997) suggests that they are probably acquired implicitly during the course of students’ college careers. Pascarella and Terenzini (1991) concluded that these implicitly acquired cognitive abilities may be as important to a student’s future success as factual knowledge acquired through formal college coursework.

1. What is the topic sentence?

2. What does the topic sentence indicate that the paragraph will be about?

3. There are two main points made in this paragraph to support the thesis statement (that thinking skills that are important outcomes of a college education are acquired tacitly or without students being conscious of learning them). What are these points?

4. What authorities did the author cite to support the first argument?

5. What other authorities did the author cite in support of the second point?

6. What is the concluding sentence?