The Relationships Between Critical Thinking Skills And Critical Thinking Dispositions&College Experiences Of College English Major Student

In recent years, critical thinking has become one of the major topics discussed amongeducators who seek to improve students’ thinking abilities. Various reasons have beengiven to convince educators of the importance of critical thinking. Many educatorsconsider a student s ability to think critically to be their greatest pedagogical concern. Notonly in western country, but also non-western country have been aware of that theimportance of critical thinking is a nationwide educational goal.The purposes of this study were to assess the differences and relationships betweenfour universities English major students critical thinking skills and their critical thinkingdispositions&college experiences. All third-year students were participated in this study.The four universities were selected based on their academic status.This study utilized the Cambridge Thinking Skills Assessment, the California CriticalThinking Dispositions Inventory, and the College Student Experience Questionnaire. Thesample consisted of398usable data out of416survey questionnaires gathered for thisstudy. The data were analyzed by using ANOVA tests, and Spearman Rho tests to find thedifferences between schools, and to search for the relationships between critical thinkingskills and critical thinking dispositions&college experiences.The findings revealed that students in this population had mediate critical thinkingskills. The correlation results indicated that critical thinking dispositions, especiallyanalyticity and maturity played important roles in motivating students to perform criticalthinking, though the impact was not very strong. Relationships with faculty had small andnegative significant impacts on critical thinking skills.The findings of the study can offer some implications to university English teachersfor utilizing effective methods in class to improve students critical thinking skills. Furtherstudies in a larger population are recommended for comparison with the findings of thisstudy. Moreover, other research procedures or instruments are suggested to gain moreinsight into China students’ critical thinking.