خلاصة:
Preparing students to be able to think critically and analytically is a goal of higher education and also a quality sought by employers of university graduates. Nurturing thinking skill is considered as an important variable in the process of student learning. To nurture thinking skills, effective infusion of critical thinking skills could be the first step to activate and prompt students’ thinking skills in classroom. This exploratory study seeks to investigate student perceptions of university instructors’ infusion of critical thinking skills through an evaluation questionnaire. A sample of 132 undergraduate students completed this survey. The results showed that students positively confirmed the efforts of university instructors in infusing thinking skills in their courses. However, the question arises as to the issue of balancing the infusion between LOTS and HOTS categories optimally so that university students are able to benefit from critical skill training. This could lead to a rethink on defining more refined learning outcomes according to the skill categories in accordance to Bloom’s taxonomy.
ملخص الجهاز:
Infusing Thinking Skills in the Classroom: Perceptions of Undergraduates in China Public Universities Yan Ziguang1, Chan Swee Heng2* College of Foreign Languages, Hebei University, China1 School of Education, Taylor's University Malaysia2 Email: chansweeheng@gmail.
This exploratory study seeks to investigate students’ perceptions of university instructors’ infusion of critical thinking skills in their teaching through an evaluation questionnaire.
Recently, the studies only focused on the investigation of critical thinking skills infusion in classroom from the instructors’ views, but not from the students’ perceptions (邹绍艳&高秀雪, 2015).
The study suggests that in language teaching, especially in a comprehension classroom, thinking skills such as drawing inferences, making predictions, monitoring one’s own understanding of written materials should be infused more emphatically (Mahyuddin, Pihie, Elias, & Konting, 2004).
Essentially, infusion and the promotion of critical thinking skills entail teaching students to use information and concepts that they have learnt in school to make decisions and solve problems effectively (Swartz et al.
This is also evident in Sheha, Aziz and Mustapha’s (2010) study, in which they found that the lecturers infuse mostly LOTS, especially the lowest level of critical thinking skills (Knowledge) in classroom teaching.
In this taxonomy, skills involving Analysis, Evaluation and Synthesis (creation of new knowledge) are defined as HOTS, involving the learning of complex judgmental skills such as critical thinking and problem solving and the rest of the skills are defined as LOTS: Knowledge, Comprehension and Application(Higher-order thinking, n.