Understanding English-Major MA Students’ Development Of Critical Thinking In A Research-Oriented Course:A Case Study

Critical thinking(CT)is believed to be indispensable for people’s thriving in the 21st century.The cultivation of CT,therefore,has become a significant goal of education in today’s progressively complex world,especially in the higher education realm.The need for universities and colleges to promote postgraduates’ CT is emerging as an important issue worldwide.In China,CT has been regarded as a prominent objective of postgraduate education.The Ministry of Education has explicitly placed emphasis on cultivating postgraduates’ CT in terms of postgraduate curriculum construction.There is a substantial body of research focusing on the effective pedagogies in teaching MA students’ CT.A less studied aspect of CT education pertains to the English-major MA students’ perceptions of their CT development processes and influencing factors.The present study aims to reveal academic-oriented English-major MA students’perceptions of their CT development in a program of academic reading and writing at a university in China.To explore the participating students’ opinions in depth,the case study approach is adopted and multiple sources of data are collected,which consist of field notes,students’ written documents such as 12 weekly reading notes,14 reflective journals,and one semi-structured interview.Drawing on these data,findings indicate that the two focal participants had similar developmental trajectories of CT,namely,from accepting all the ideas at face value,to finding faults in papers purely on instinct,into conceptually realizing the importance of evidence proving their propositions,resulting in evaluating the ideas from multiple sources dialectically.As for the factors exerting influence on students’ CT development,teacher facilitation,self-directed learning,and collaborative learning are found to be the major themes.In other words,the participating students’ CT development was mainly resulted from their reflective autonomous learning of the assigned papers under the timely guidance of the instructor and in cooperation and communication with peer classmates.The thesis concludes with implications for postgraduates about how to effectively develop their CT in a course and for university instructors about how to design and complement a CT-developing course while promoting subject matter instruction.