The purpose of the present explanatory mixed-method design is to examine the effectiveness of a developmental intervention, Embedded Metacognitive Prompts based on Nature of Science (EMPNOS) to teach the nature of science using metacognitive prompts embedded in an inquiry unit. Eighty-three (N = 83) eighth-grade students from four classrooms were randomly assigned to an experimental and a comparison group. All participants were asked to respond to a number of tests (content and nature of science knowledge) and surveys (metacognition and self-regulatory efficacy). Participants were also interviewed. It was hypothesized that the experimental group would outperform the comparison group in all measures. Partial support for the hypotheses was found. Specifically, results showed significant gains in content knowledge and nature of science knowledge of the experimental group over the comparison group. Qualitative findings revealed that students in the comparison group reported scientific thinking in similar terms as the scientific method, while the experimental group reported that scientists were creative and had to explain events using evidence, which is more closely aligned to the aspects of the nature of science. EMPNOS may have implications as a useful classroom tool in guiding students to check their thinking for alignment to the nature of science.

The effect of nature of science metacognitive prompts on science students' content and nature of science knowledge, metacognition, and self -regulatory efficacy

There is a heated debate over whether critical thinking can be taught in the educational field for the reasons that its definition is seldom comprehensively given and universally accepted by the academia, as well as its value and impacts on the development of learners’ critical thinking skills. Focusing on the practical use of critical thinking, the main concern in this paper is whether critical thinking can be taught, particularly in an EFL classroom. The reflection on several conceptions and characteristics of critical thinking will be firstly introduced. When discussing these accounts, the reasons that why it is challenging to teach critical thinking as well as why it can be taught in previous relevant literature will be presented. Then the current situations of critical thinking skills taught in the classroom, taking a Chinese EFL classroom for an example, will be illustrated and finally the reasons why it is popular as a tool in teaching and learning will be discussed.

Reasoning Critical Thinking: Is It Born or Made?

Purpose – When students relate current events to the concepts studied in the classroom by writing and presenting a series of analyses in the form of regular journaling, their learning and critical thinking improves as they regularly connect theory, presented in the lessons and textbooks, to real-world applications. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – A rubric used to assess the progress of student critical thinking showed that all three categories that display critical thinking through reflective reasoning improved: analysis, comprehension and application. Findings – This paper establishes the positive impact of current event journaling on critical thinking and student interest in courses by monitoring courses where current event journaling was incorporated. One of the key findings of this study is that the critical thinking skills of students evolved and became more advanced as the semester progressed, as did their ability to identify links in research and studies to cla...

Improved critical thinking in students using current events journaling

In this conceptual article, I present a hierarchical view of the iterative process of learning and development as applied to the doctoral context and make a conceptual case for Doctoral Intelligenc...

Making a case for Doctoral Intelligence: Conceptualisation and insights for researcher development

Exploration of Action Learning and Critical Thinking: A Study of the Critical Thinking Development of Senior Managers

"In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual." Galileo When I began teaching science I had hoped that students could learn to employ biological concepts in a reasonable way to solve the everyday problems they will face in the future. I wanted students to have beliefs and even passionate beliefs, if not about the environment and the miracle of their own bodies, then about something--anything--that was important to them. The scientific method is, of course, very powerful in continually refining our view of how the world works. However, in science classes, the scientific method is taught as a series of steps that are dutifully memorized and repeated usually without any detailed explanation about how to get from one step to the next. I believe that if science teachers had a better understanding of critical thinking they could provide students with the necessary link between learning factual knowledge and applying that knowledge to their belief systems. In order to clarify this statement, let me explore two questions: First, what is meant by the term critical thinking. As a trained biologist, I was not aware of the time and effort that education and psychology has invested in the term critical thinking. In 1916 John Dewey imagined that we deliberately seek out the basis for our beliefs and the adjunct information to support them (Dewey, 1916). Dewey called this process reflective thought. Self-directed thought examines a belief to determine what it is based on and to ascertain what consequences will follow from that belief. Dewey felt that reflective thought was the only thing that keeps us from acting on habit and impulse alone. Many others define critical thinking (see Adams, 1993; Facione, 1984; Moll & Allen, 1982; Morgan, 1995) but rather than list all of the definitions, it probably makes more sense to determine what they may have in common. First, nearly every definition has some reference to reason or using reasoning. Second, the terms reason or reasoning also convey the notion of logic or being logical. Those who study logic appear to agree that, with or without formal training in logic, humans are (at least in principle) reasonable and rational (Eysenek & Keane, 1990). The second question to explore is, if we are all reasonable and rational then why do we not think critically all the time? There has been some research that suggests why we may not. Perkins and Hafner (1983) found that reasoning processes were routinely impaired by problems of bias and incomplete reasoning. The adult and college students they studied had committed sins of omission where reasoning skills were all right as far as they went, but never went far enough. What is of interest here is that even though we as humans are logical and rational, we cannot recognize our own biases, the biases of others, and the validity of opposing arguments. Thus, another point that the definitions appear to have in common, is the assumption that there is an awareness on the learner's part about the thought process itself, and therefore a willingness and desire to make appropriate decisions. In order to clarify this last concept Zeidler, et al. (1992) studied Dewey's concept of reflective thought. First, critical thinkers possess a certain mind-set with which they approach ideas. Dewey imagined that one must be willing to endure suspense and to undergo the trouble of searching. Second, the critical thinker is a skeptic who is willing to suspend judgement or is unwilling to accept any idea until evidence can be demonstrated to permit its acceptance, perhaps developing a critical thinking ethic as recommended by Halpern (1998). This mind-set or ethic will require learners to reflect on the reasoning of others and on their own reasoning to solve the socio-scientific dilemmas of the future (Zeidler, et al., 1992). Unfortunately, undergraduate and graduate college students do not seem to exhibit the level of reflective judgement and reasoning skills expected for 16-20 years of education (Mine, King, Hood, & Wood, 1990). …

Critical Thinking, Scientific Thinking, and Everyday Thinking: Metacognition about Cognition

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Critical Thinking, Scientific Thinking, and Everyday Thinking: Metacognition about Cognition