Critical thinking skills

The present study explored the effect of a pedagogical blog on Iranian EFL learners’ creative and critical thinking skills using a mixed-methods approach. In the pedagogical blog, the researchers asked learners divergent and evaluative questions based on Lindley’s model (1993). The quantitative data were collected by administering Creativity Test Questionnaire (ATC) and the Persian version of the California Critical Thinking Skills Test and were analyzed using SPSS Version 16.0 software. The qualitative data consisted of the posts written by the participants of the study in the class blog and were analyzed using thematic analysis. The findings revealed that the pedagogical blog significantly improved the participants’ creative and critical thinking skills, which were represented in their posts by the main themes of fluency, elaboration, and flexibility as components of divergent thinking and inference, evaluation, induction, and reconstruction as features of open and active critical thinking skills. Further findings and implications are discussed in the paper.

In recent years, the importance of thinking skills in education has attracted the attention of researchers. To this end, this study investigated the effect of scaffolding and implicit instructions on the critical thinking skills (i.e., inference, evaluation, analysis, inductive and deductive reasoning) of EFL learners. To this end, 20 EFL learners who were taking an IELTS course at a language institute in two intact classes were chosen as the participants. One group was randomly assigned as the experimental group and their critical thinking skills were scaffolded following Vygotsky’s developmental model of the Zone of Proximal Development, and the other group was assigned as the control group and received implicit instruction for promoting critical thinking skills. California Critical Thinking Skills Test Form B developed by Facione and Facione (1993) was used to check the participants’ critical thinking skills. The results of the paired-samples t-test displayed that scaffolding and implicit instructions enhanced the EFL learners’ critical thinking. The analyses of the independent-samples t-test showed that the experimental group promoted their critical thinking to a greater extent in comparison with the control group. The findings of one-way MANCOVA indicated that by controlling for the pre-tests, scaffolding instruction was more effective than implicit instruction in developing the EFL learners’ critical thinking skills.

Due to the vital role of critical thinking skills in students' educational and non-educational success, the present research attempted to examine the impact of critical thinking skills in TBSIR approach on the computer-based English expository essay writing of Iranian university students. Participants of this study included 30 students at Gonbad-e-Kavous and Hazrat-e-Masoumeh universities in Iran. They answered to the Watson-Glaser critical thinking skills test (1980), then after two weeks of reviewing TSR structure, they wrote a computer-based English expository essay as pre-test. After four weeks of learning TBSIR structure, they wrote another computer-based English expository essay as post-test. The paired samples t-test and Pearson correlation were run and the results revealed the impact of critical thinking skills in the TBSIR approach on the computer-based English expository essay writing of Iranian university students. Also, the results indicate the positive and significant correlation between critical thinking skills especially analysis and interpretation and the computer-based English expository essay writing of Iranian university students, which helps the students to promote their educational and social lives. Finally, teachers, teacher trainers, syllabus designers and materials developers can benefit from the results of this study.