Generalizations

Generalization is a topic and idea that comes up in our every day lives. It happens quite often among individuals in many different scenarios. Generalizing occurs when a claim is made about a group from a claim that has some part of it. Though generalization can have good or bad connotations, it is often used, and sometimes in the wrong situations. There are three premises that are required for a strong generalization: the sample must be representative, the sample is big enough, and the sample is studied thoroughly. The idea of a generalization has a similar basis to the idea of making a strong argument. Though a generalization may make a claim about a group or population, there needs to be some margin of error (but not too large) for the population sample. Additionally, there also needs to be a confidence level for the population sample. This level will be larger, closer to at least 95% of the generalization.

What I Liked, What I Didn't Like

My favorite thing or things in this class was actually the group projects. Part of it was the fact that I had such excellent group members. The other part was how effective the group projects made us think and develop our own ideas. We were able to interact with each other through an online class, with very minimal in-person interaction. This demonstrated our ability and potential to communicate with one another, and also showed everybody’s motivation and their willingness to meet deadlines and due dates. I was very impressed with the way our group projects turned out logistically. My least favorite thing about the class was the discussion posts. Sometimes it was tough to come up with ideas just to meet the word requirement. It was also challenging to comment on other people’s posts – sometimes, there just was not too much to be said that was not said already. I also felt the tests were on the challenging side, and did not really reflect what I have actually picked up from the class. Though there were practice exercises in the book, I feel that some sort of test review for the tests would have been an improvement to the class.

What I Learned..

There are quite a few concepts that I have learned over the semester. Constructing an argument that is strong and has the potential to be debated over was a topic that seemed to come up throughout the class. But by demonstrating the different ideas and baseline rules that create a strong argument, I felt that we were able to complete our projects thoroughly and effectively. Additionally, many of the concepts that we were taught in the books and needed to write about in our blog involved real life experiences that occur quite frequently. This helps us to identify what types of ideas are being used in an argument. The chapter on reasoning by analogy and also the discussion of fallacies were quite interesting. It was very easy to adapt these ideas into our blog discussions since it was convenient to provide examples from our every day lives. Although this was an online class, our group projects also taught us how to work with other individuals on projects when our communication is somewhat limited.