College educators and administrators have long valued critical thinking as a desired outcome of undergraduate education for its academic, professional, and personal benefits. While researchers have found a number of instructional strategies that promote critical thinking in college, less is known about how these skills transfer to authentic settings outside of the classroom. Since learning transfer is a perennial challenge in education, and the laborious nature of transferring critical thinking requires motivation, researchers need to better understand instructional methods that enhance students' applied use of critical thinking. Transfer of critical thinking in non-academic settings is further complicated due to the way real-life situations elicit biases in reasoning that make individuals subjective reasoners. Argument mapping, in which students create visual diagrams of arguments, is a technique that has been shown to lead to quantitative gains in college students' critical thinking as measured on tests. This study extends understanding of the benefits and uses of argument mapping by exploring students' firsthand experiences of collaboratively argument mapping contentious issues known to induce subjective, biased reasoning and thus impede critical thinking. Further, the study explored how students perceived its utility in other settings, which sheds light on its potential to transfer. This study resulted in three findings that deepen understanding of the influence of argument mapping: students experienced cognitive and interpersonal difficulties in creating collaborative argument maps; collaborative argument mapping led students to more fairly and deliberately examine arguments about contentious issues; and students believed that argument mapping improved their ability to comprehend arguments and construct their own. The study offers a number of conclusions on the potential of argument mapping to facilitate students' examination of their beliefs, its ability to promote understanding between people with different views on issues, its value in acting as a scaffold for argument analysis, and its role in equipping students with argument analysis skills beyond academic settings. It thus offers insight into how college and adult educators can help the field of Adult Learning realize one of its ultimate goals: to promote individual growth and the betterment of society through the power of critical thought. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2222/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]