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Critical Thinking Ability: The Interrelationship between University Majors (Humanities vs. Engineering)and the Effect of Critical Thinking-Oriented Instruction

Sadehvandi, Nikan | 2012

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  1. Type of Document: M.Sc. Thesis
  2. Language: English
  3. Document No: 43631 (31)
  4. University: Sharif University of Technology
  5. Department: Languages and Linguistics Center
  6. Advisor(s): Alemi, Minoo; Tajeddin, Zia
  7. Abstract:
  8. Critical thinking has been the center of attention in education and academia over the last several decades. It can be fostered at different rates and extents in different academic disciplines given the diverse cognitive processes that students need to go through. Hence, an understanding over the extent to which a specific field of study in higher education aids the development of critical thinking might help educators and educational system to see what should be revised, substituted, and/or added in a curriculum. Accordingly, the major thrust of the current study was to compare the critical thinking ability of 296 humanities and engineering undergraduate students at four Iranian universities. The trait structure of Honey’s (2004) Critical Thinking Appraisal (CTA) was also explored in this study. In addition, the influence of gender and major of study, as independent variables, were also investigated. Finally, the effectiveness of an implicit critical thinking instruction was examined using a pretest-posttest quasi-experimental design. For this purpose, an experiment was conducted on sixty-nine engineering and fifty-one humanities undergraduate students, using general English classes at Sharif University of Technology and Allameh Tabataba’i University. Subsequently, the two groups were exposed to eight ninety-minute intervention sessions on critical thinking through the implementation of a critical reading program. The critical thinking instructional tasks and reading passages were adapted from Thomson (2002) and Weiner and Green (2006), respectively. Data were collected via Honey’s CTA and a critical reading test. Factor analysis, descriptive statistics, and t-test were employed to interpret the data.The results indicated that university major significantly affected the critical thinking ability of undergraduate students since engineering students significantly outperformed humanities students on the critical thinking test. No significant influence was discovered for gender on the test of critical thinking. However, male undergraduate students scored higher on the evaluation sub-skill. In addition, although there was a significant difference between students’ mean scores on the critical reading pretest and posttest in both experimental groups, only humanities students improved in terms of their critical thinking ability after the instruction. Based on the findings, it is concluded that since there might exist differences among undergraduate students in different majors, curriculum designers and instructors need to count for such differences when designing courses on critical thinking. Nevertheless, students can benefit from the instruction of critical thinking over time even if the outcome is not evident immediately upon the completion of a single course on critical thinking
  9. Keywords:
  10. Critical Thinking ; Critical Reading ; University Major ; Critical Thinking-Oriented Instruction

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