Seeking Critical Thinking in an Undergraduate Seminar: Is the Motivation to Think Deeply and Willingness to Communicate Associated with Critical Thinking? Jessica Hallett How it All Began This paper was inspired by questions that arose while I was enrolled in a senior seminar at the University of Southern Maine during the fall of The Professor had posed the question: What makes an authentic discussion? We sought to define this notion and to enact it. I found that even months after our class had ended that I was extremely passionate about the subject, prompting this research. Research After doing some research I found that a lot of work has been done on students motivation to participate in discussions, but rarely has critical thinking been measured. Self Determination Theory founded by Ryan and Deci (2000) discuss the difference and effect of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Pintrich and DeGroot (1990) looked at self-regulated cognition and behavior within a classroom setting. Hypotheses H1: Willingness to Communicate is associated with how we talk in discussion including, frequency of talking, offering opinions, responding to others, presenting a story of personal experience, and making statements related to the text. H2: Willingness to Communicate is associated with critical thinking. H3: The Need for Cognition is associated with critical thinking. Method Subjects An intact undergraduate seminar course of 10 students served as subjects in this study, a convenience sample. There were five women and five men. The class ran for fall semester, 2012. Method Within the first week of the semester students were asked to fill out two surveys, The Need for Cognition Scale and the Willingness to Communicate Scale. These scales provided mean scores. At four class meetings a half hour of the class discussion was recorded, transcribed and coded for four levels of critical thinking. sessions chosen periodically throughout the semester of this senior seminar were coded for 8 different discussion variables. Method Critical thinking was measured by using a specific set of definitions that were used to analyze students dialogue. Five of these variables were focused on discussion behavior including, Frequency of talk, offers opinions, responds to others, responds to others, presents a personal story or experience and makes statement related to text. Four critical thinking variables were also observed and recorded including, triggering, exploration, integration, and resolution. Results Hypothesis 1: For the first hypothesis, Willingness to Communicate is associated with talk in discussion, the Spearmans rho revealed a statistically significant relationship between the Total Willingness to Communicate and offering opinions (rs[10]=.604, p