Design And Empirical Research On Online Peer Evaluation Gauges To Promote The Development Of Critical Thinking Among College Students

Under the call of the national policy "public entrepreneurship and innovation" innovative thinking earned the whole community's worldwide attention, especially in the higher education field. As the core of innovative thinking,critical thinking has also been identified as one of the primary curriculum objectives. "Academic Writing" is such an important curriculum, which requires students not only to have good language skills and to examine the ideas and facts critically, but also to integrate them to generate new ideas. However, the current domestic research rarely cares the promotion of the critical thinking in academic writing course. Considering the advantages of online peer evaluation activities in improving the efficiency of the evaluation, resolving the evaluation conflicts, encouraging students to participate in and promoting deep learning, this paper aims to design an critical thinking analytical rubric for academic writing for the online peer evaluation activities, and to use it in the "academic writing" course teaching with online peer evaluation activities, in order to promote college students' critical thinking, and verified the effect in the last.We sorted out existing literature on critical thinking and taxonomy of educational objectives in the cognitive domain model and analysed the "academic writing" course objectives, we then designed an draft of the rubic, then carried out a second revision on the rubic and a third perfection according to the experts' opinion, finished the Critical Thinking Analytical Rubric for Academic Writing for online peer evaluation activities (CTARAW). It contains 12 criterias with descriptions of the two ends of performance domains i.e. the best and the weakest points and a commentary space. We had verified the reliability and validity of the rubic. Secondly, We used the rubic in the experiment. We explored the potential of the rubic for fostering the development of critical thinking skills by quasi experimental study. The subjects of the experiment were three classes of students majoring in communication science at M University. A class was identifede as the control group randomly; the other two classes as experimental group,one was experimental group A and the else was experimental group B. The control group accepted the teacher's evaluation based on the traditional writing rubic online;The students in experimental group A accepted the teacher's online evaluation based on CTARAW; students in experimental group B evaluated peers based on CTARAW online. Evaluation content was the writing task students submitted. Evaluation activities were based on the Moodle platform,sustained 3 months.Before and after the experimental intervention, two tools ——CCTST and cognitive questionnaire for critical thinking——were used to measure students' critical thinking level in the experimental group and the control group. Meanwhile, after the intervention, we graded the term work of the experimental group and the control group. We also examined the relevance of the term work scores and CCTST scores and investigated the students'perceptions of the activity they experienced potential to foster critical thinking ability in academic writing. Finally, we conducted a quantitative and qualitative analysis for research data.The study found, to some extent online peer evaluation activities based on CTARAW are more helpful than online teacher evaluation activities based on CTARAW and online teacher evaluation based on the traditional writing rubic to promote critical thinking ability in academic writing at first, especially in the inductive reasoning dimension, the analysis dimension and the evaluation dimensions. Second, to some extent online peer evaluation activities based on CTARAW help to improve students'academic writing skills. Third, most of the students recognize the potential of online peer evaluation activities based on CTARAW to foster critical thinking ability. Fourth, the learners' engagement in activities, content knowledge and understanding for the value of learning activities will all affect the final experimental results.