A Study On The Current Situation Of The Critical Thinking Of High School Students

Critical thinking is a kind of reasonable and reflective thinking.It evaluates thinking through certain standards,thereby,to improve thinking quality.The new era calls for that the innovation subjects should have an element of critical thinking,for there would be no new findings without doubt and there would be no innovation without criticism.Therefore,there is no doubt that critical thinking as the core element of knowledge innovation for high school students is quite important.Critical thinking way and thinking habit are not only the foundation of the cultivation of high school students' innovation ability,but also contribute to the all-round development of high school students' personality.It is good for them to improve their ability to adapt to the information era of rapid development,to have the future society well in hand.Based on the classification of critical thinking,put forward by the Delphi report(Facione,P.A,1990a),the author tried to:(1)explore the overall characteristics and the development trend of critical thinking tendency and critical thinking skills of high school students.(2)Analyze the correlation between different gender/subject classification and high school students' critical thinking tendency/skills.(3)Research the interaction effects on high school students' critical thinking tendency and critical thinking skills respectively between gender and subject classification.(4)Study the correlation of Critical thinking tendency and Critical thinking skills.It is hoped that this research reveals the current situation of high school students' critical thinking ability in China,and provides reference for high school English teachers to improve their teaching methods.This research selected 102 students from two parallel classes of Grade 2 in Linfen No.1 School to participate in the investigation.First,the participants were asked to fill in the California Critical Thinking Questionnaire,which was revised by Peng Meici of Hong Kong Polytechnic University in 2004.It was used to measure students' critical thinking tendency.Then the same participants were invited to write an English argument.The author used the context of their composition,with the help of the revision of the Critical Thinking Skills Inventory,to evaluate their critical thinking skills.In this study,the data from the questionnaire were analyzed by the Social Science Statistical Package(SPSS Version21.0).To analyze the overall of high school students' critical thinking tendency(seven sub-dimensions)and skills(six sub-skills),descriptive statistical methods were used,including the distribution of students' scoring percentage of critical thinking tendency /skills in different scales.With the help of the independent-samples t-test,the author analyzed the influence that streaming and gender may have on high school students' critical thinking tendency/critical thinking skills.Two-factor variance analysis was used to compare the interaction effect of gender and discipline on the critical thinking tendency/critical thinking skills of high school students.Finally the author tested the correlation of high school students' critical thinking tendency and skills through the correlation analysis.According to the survey results,the author drew the conclusions as follows: First,the overall critical thinking ability of high school students is weak.Most sub-dimensions of students' critical thinking tendency were not distributed evenly.They were also lack of critical thinking skills.In a word,the current high school students' critical thinking ability was still in a very low level.Second,there was no statistically significant difference between boys and girls in terms of overall critical thinking tendency and critical thinking skills.Third,there existed significant difference between arts and science students in terms of overall critical thinking tendency,but not much difference among critical thinking skills.Fourth,the interactions of gender and discipline on students' critical thinking tendency and skills were not significant(P > 0.05).Fifth,there was no correlation between critical thinking tendency and skills among high school students,as a whole.However,the Analyticity dimension of critical thinking tendency had certain correlation with Analysis and Explanation skills;and there existed correlation between Self-confidence and Explanation;in addition,Maturity had significant correlation with Evaluation and Explanation.Based on the research results above,the author thought that teachers should treat the cultivation of students' critical thinking ability as a main teaching goal at high school,teach students how to think independently,and cultivate their critical thinking quality by training critical thinking throughout the teaching notion,teaching content,teaching methods and teaching evaluation,so as to cultivate more high-quality talents for the future.