Research On Critical Thinking Of Undergraduate: Concept, History And Practice

Since 1980s, critical thinking teaching received great attention in the United States and other western countries. Critical thinking has become one of the core skills of education. Many universities, even some middle and primary schools set the critical thinking course to enhance student's critical thinking ability. Critical thinking has been contained into the teaching program in many school. At the same time, extensive researches on critical thinking have been carried out in the academia. At present, in China the scale of higher education has been ranked first in the world. Improving the quality of higher education will be an important issue of reform and development of higher education. This dissertation analyzes the concept and theory of critical thinking, reviewes the development of critical thinking movement in the United States, surveyes the current status of critical thinking of Chinese undergraduates, and finally makes proposals on how to carry out critical thinking teaching in China.Firstly, this dissertation analyzes systematically the concept and theory of critical thinking for the distinctive concepts of critical thinking involve philosophy, psychology and pedagogy. This dissertation believes that critical thinking means "comment", not " negation " in the Chinese context. However, evaluating/commenting a theory means negating, because to some extent choosing a certain standard and giving up other criteria is a course of negation. Critical thinking intended to be comprehensive and profound review, comment content can be "right and wrong," "good and bad" "true and false", "success and failure" and so on. Based on analyzing systematically the concept and theory of critical thinking, this paper summarizes three types of representative theory of critical thinking:Dewey's Reflections theory, critical thinking skills theory and critical thinking theory of cognitive development.Critical thinking is not unique to western countries. In Chinese traditional culture, critical thinking can be found constantly. The representative of critical thinking in ancient China was Mohist who had perfect critical thinking theory. Mohist formed precise critical thinking theory through the methods of "know why", "know what," and "analogy". In addition, educational theory in ancient China also attaches great importance to the role of reflection in learning. The key reason why Chinese students are lack of critical thinking is that it is questioned by the mainstream culture. Chinese traditional culture on the development of critical thinking is not a promotion, but the obstacles.This article conducted a survey on critical thinking status of college students. I select a local university for the survey, using the "California Critical Thinking Skills Test " and "California Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory" as investigative tools. Through the survey, I find that most college students have general weak tendency of critical thinking, their critical thinking skills have a big gap to the norm. This dissertation believes that there are three main reasons to cause the situation:First, the impact of China's traditional way of thinking; second, lack of critical thinking in Chinese educational goal; third, classroom teaching constraints critical thinking. In view of the status of critical thinking students and causes, this paper carried out the idea of critical thinking education:the first is to adjust our current educational purposes in terms of the principles of personalization, pertinence, and diversity. The education of "humanity" should be emphasized first and then is "specialty". Second, to achieve critical classroom teaching:teachers should foster the concept of classroom teaching of critical thinking, improve knowledge and ability of critical thinking teaching, while universities should reform curriculum, teaching methods and evaluation systems with critical thinking-oriented...