The Impact Of Chinese Holistic Thinking Styles On Chinese College Students’ Critical Thinking Dispositions: From A Cultural Perspective

Critical thinking is “purposeful, self-regulatory judgment which results ininterpretation, analysis, evaluation and inference, as well as explanation of the evidential,conceptual, methodological, criteriological, or contextual considerations upon which thatjudgment is based.” A number of researches at home and abroad indicate Chinese collegestudents present weak critical thinking dispositions. Some people attribute the reasons totraditional Chinese culture, arguing characteristic Chinese thinking styles influenced byChinese culture deviate with modern critical thinking. This paper is an empirical researchto test this question. There are two research objectives: evaluating the situation ofChinese college students’ critical thinking dispositions and Chinese holistic thinkingstyles; and exploring the relationship between the above two factors.This research adopts questionnaire as instrument,409students in HuazhongUniversity of Science and Technology are involved in the study. The questionnaire isconsisted of two parts: the first part is Chinese Holistic Thinking Styles Scale (CHTSS)designed by Hou Yubo et al.; the second part is the Chinese version of California CriticalThinking Dispositions Inventory (CCTDI) designed by Facione et al. Previous researcheshave proved good reliability and validity of both the two scales.There are four major findings of this research. Firstly, on the whole, the examineduniversity students present a positive disposition of critical thinking. But their meanscore of CCTDI just surpass the marginal value. They reflect weaker critical thinkingdispositions in comparison with foreign college students. Chinese college students areespecially weak in the dimension of truth-seeking and open-mindedness. Secondly, forChinese holistic thinking styles, the examined university students reflect most relevancefeatures, followed by contradiction and change features. Thirdly, all the three factors ofrelevance, contradiction and change are significantly related with critical thinking dispositions. The relevance factor is positively and closely related with critical thinkingdispositions; contradiction factor and change factor are negatively but lowly related withcritical thinking dispositions. Fourthly, Chinese holistic thinking styles cannot whollyexplain students’ performance in critical thinking dispositions. Apart from the threefactors, there are still other undiscovered variables influence Chinese college students’critical thinking dispositions.The results of this research enlighten us that it is imperative to improve Chinesestudents’ critical thinking in higher education, but we cannot totally attribute Chinesestudents’ weak critical thinking dispositions to traditional Chinese culture. We shouldtake advantage of the positive elements in characteristic Chinese thinking styles, andreduce the negative elements’ influence to critical thinking with the purpose ofdeveloping Chinese students’ critical thinking.