Assessment And Cultivation On Critical Thinking Ability Of English Majors

No matter in western countries or in China, critical thinking ability has always beenclaimed and emphasized as one of the most important goals of education in the informationage. Being considered an essential capacity, critical thinking ability has turned scholars’attention to English majors who are believed lack the ability. Pointing to the reality of ouruniversity that English majors participate less actively than science majors in innovationprojects, the present study aims to testify whether English majors are inferior to sciencemajors in critical thinking ability by empirical studies. The research instrument of this study isdesigned based on “the objective measuring tool for student’s skills of critical thinking”(Wenqiufang et al.2009,2010a,2010b,2010c), the “CCTST-CV”(Wu hongzhi et al.2010) and the“CCTDI-CV”(Peng meici et al.2004).120full-time students from freshmen to seniors inEnglish major and Science major were selected by stratified random sampling method to takethe test.Problems to be solved include:(1) Concerning with critical thinking skills and disposition, do English majors inferior toscience students?(2) Do disciplines make any difference on students’ development of critical thinkingability?(3) Do critical thinking skills develop synchronously with critical thinking disposition?(4) What sort of teaching philosophy is effective for critical thinking cultivation?The self-designed research instrument is disciplinary neutral, gears to collegeundergraduates and presents in Chinese. It has been proved valid and reliable after beingtested and revised. SPSS18.0software was employed for the quantitative analyses whichinclude descriptive analysis, Independent-Sample T test, Pearson correlation analysis, exploreanalysis, One-way ANOVA and Pearson Chi-Square.In order to conduct a comprehensive and objective survey, comparisons were made notonly among each grade of English majors, but between English majors and Science majors aswell. Main findings of this study can be summed up as follows:(1) Distinct from what people had believed, but consistent with the empirical researchesconducted previously, English majors, in this study, as science majors in our university, possess positive critical thinking disposition and a moderate level of critical thinking skills onaverage. To be specific, English majors are as capable of critical thinking skills as sciencemajors in the same grade, whereas inferior to science majors in critical thinking dispositionjust before graduation.(2) The effects of disciplines having on students’ critical thinking ability are not as strongand rapid as had been thought. In addition, the results of Pearson Chi-Square show thatstudents from both majors advanced on critical thinking skills throughout the four-yeareducation; while their critical thinking disposition is disciplinary and gender dependent.(3) Critical thinking skills and critical thinking disposition correlated positively witheach other, but they don’t develop in a balanced way.(4) Combined with analyzing the answers to the open-ended question, defects in Englishteaching, suggested measures and factors expected to be included in teaching philosophy, theeffectiveness of PBL on critical thinking cultivation are proved operative from boththeoretical and empirical perspectives.The research results enlighten educators that the endeavor in cultivating students’ criticalthinking skills as well as critical thinking disposition is called for at the same time. ThoughPBL has been proposed as an effective teaching philosophy in cultivating students’ CT whereteachers play a role of guiders and facilitators in students’ self-directed study, it can never beeasy, since the teachers themselves’ critical thinking ability is primarily required.Some innovations can be found in this study as well. First, this is a school-based research.Proceeding from our university’s reality, the suggestions put forward in this study arepertinent to the real cases of our university, which make it practically significant. Second,rather than investigating the level of critical thinking ability in terms of language skills as theprevious studies did, this study assessed students’ critical thinking ability according to thesubjects’ general knowledge. Third, distinctly from the translated versions of test papers, themeasuring tool of this study is self-designed and gears to Chinese college students. Fourth, theresearch methodology consists of both qualitative study and quantitative study wherecomparisons have been made between disciplines and among students from freshmen toseniors.