| Recently in education, the development of critical thinking skills has become the goal of innovative pedagogical strategies, inspired by long time philosophical practice. Contemporary leaders in education espouse that critical thinking is essential to the academic and personal development of young minds. Yet, little is known about how critical thinking develops, and how it might be promoted in middle school students. A common belief amongst scholars in the fields of philosophy, education and cognitive science is that the development of critical thinking requires deliberate metacognitive and analytical performance (Feldman, 1999; Kuhn & Dean, 2004; Nosich, 2009; vanGelder, 2005). The development of higher-order skills does not evolve without nurturing; the acquisition of critical thinking skills requires exercise, practice, and active engagement. This study was conducted to explore whether a seminar in philosophy, aimed to engage middle school students in philosophical exercise and practice, would impact their critical thinking skills. The seminar, which focused primarily on argument analysis, consisted of eight thirty-minute sessions, devoted to the explicit teaching of analytic skills regarding reason and evidence. It provided students the opportunity to interact with peers in philosophical dialogue. This study was conducted with 26 6th grade students from a suburban, upstate New York public school in the fall of 2013. A pre- and post- assessment was used to measure the development of critical thinking skills of students randomly placed in a treatment or control group. The assessment consisted of six open-ended questions which were presented to students before and after the intervention. These questions were designed to measure aspects of critical thinking identified by Ennis (1993), such as judging the credibility of a source, judging the quality of an argument, being open-minded, and trying to be well-informed. The qualitative and quantitative findings from this empirical investigation provided rich and statistically significant evidence that engaging in a seminar in philosophy, focused on argument analysis, promotes critical thinking in middle-school children. |
