The development and evaluation of a package for teaching critical thinking skills in biology
Date
2014-03-20
Authors
Orsmond, C.G.
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Abstract
This study focused on the teaching of the skills of critical thinking to Standard Seven pupils by means of a specific teaching package designed for the purpose.
The teaching package was designed to determine whether critical thinking skills which are taught as an explicit and stated goal of each lesson, and then applied in the context of the subject being taught, in this case biology, will be more effectively learned. A secondary objective was to determine whether the skills learned by this means would transfer to another subject domain. Five specific principles of critical thinking were identified and selected for the teaching package. Each of these was incorporated in a specific lesson on critical thinking which was followed by a lesson on a biological topic which applied the
particular principle. The lessons on critical thinking were linked to the topic of Health, a section of the Standard Seven biology syllabus.
A non-random sample consisting o f 58 girls in Standard Seven at a girls’ school was used for the investigation, with 38 girls assigned to the experimental group and 20 to the com parison group. A pretest on critical thinking was given to determine the initial level o f ability o f the pupils in critical thinking.A post-test on critical thinking was administered at the end of the intervention period to determine whether the intervention had brought about an improvement in critical thinking. The data from the test instruments was analysed by means of an analysis of covariance (ANCOVA). When a non-random
sample is used, ANCOVA adjusts for possible initial differences between the experimental and comparison groups with regard to the covariate.
The results suggest that the pupils in the experimental group, who were exposed to the teaching intervention, improved their critical thinking skills in a number of categories, when compared with the comparison group as well as with their own initial ability level. The gain in mean scores on the post-test by the experimental group, having corrected for initial group differences, were statistically significant for the '‘total num ber o f thinking skills used" ( p < 0 .0001) and for the “number o f principles of critical thinking applied” (p = 0.03). Analysis of individual principles of critical thinking showed a statistically significant gain for the principle “gather complete information before drawing a conclusion"
( p < 0 .0001) and for the principle “question the methods by which the information was derived" (p < 0 .0 5 ), while the mean scores for the other principles showed no statistically significant gain.
Analysis of the results of the test for transferability of the skills of critical thinking to another subject domain found that the pupils in the experimental group, when tested on critical thinking through the medium of geography, achieved results which were statistically significantly better than the comparison group (p < 0 .0005 ). This suggests that there was a transfer of the skill of critical thinking to another subject domain.