An Instructional Factors Analysis of an Online Logical Fallacy Tutoring System

The proliferation of fake news has underscored the importance of critical thinking in the civic education curriculum. Despite this recognized importance, systems designed to foster these kinds of critical thinking skills are largely absent from the educational technology space. In this work, we utilize an instructional factors analysis in conjunction with an online tutoring system to determine if logical fallacies are best learned through deduction, induction, or some combination of both. We found that while participants were able to learn the informal fallacies using inductive practice alone, deductive explanations were more beneficial for learning.