While ability to read and think critically is the very basis of post-secondary education, increasing numbers of college students lack these skills. A sequence of two courses in critical reading and thinking are currently offered in the Concentrated Studies program at Duquesne University in Pennsylvania. In these courses, students who are inadequate readers study original texts (such as the writings of Aeschylus, Melville, and Tolstoy), and make use of innovative computer aids that provide coaching and drill-and-practice support. The computer programs--ABSTRACT, which teaches how to analyze a work for literary genre and structure, and INTERLOCUTOR, which allows teachers to create tutorials for machine-readable text--are original, and are written for IBM personal computers. The courses link texts to critical skills, for example, applying grammatical structure to Aristotle, or propositional logic to Machiavelli. The success of the approach has been demonstrated by retention, student achievement, and increase in the ability of Duquesne students to read and think critically. (SKC)