A Probe And Analysis Into Critical Thinking Disposition Of Academic Paper Reading And Assessment

In 1940s,western developed countries,especially the United States,went through an exploration of critical thinking(CT)and declared it as one of the major objectives of national higher education to deal with the global talent competition,while China starts this program with a slower pace.It is until the beginning of this century that there are some studies on critical thinking.And those studies mainly focus on university and senior high education,few on master degree,and none of them is on Full-time EFL(English Foreign Language)Med(Masters of English Education)program.Critical thinking disposition(CTD),an essential part of CT,also holds few studies.Aiming at the gaps,this study is to answer the following three questions:(1)How's the Med.students' critical thinking disposition?(2)To what extent is Med.students' critical thinking disposition correlated to their academic paper reading and assessment?(3)What factors hinder the cultivation of Med.students' critical thinking disposition in academic paper reading and assessment?The subjects of this study are 56 full-time English education masters from Central China Normal University(CCNU).The thesis adopts both the quantitative and qualitative methodology.The Chinese version California Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory(CCTDI-CV)from Peng Meici(2004)is used to test those Med's critical thinking disposition.The evaluation of academic paper reading and assessment come from the scores of a course assignment and their peer reviews.To improve these students' ability of academic paper reading and assessment,one of their teachers,W,asks them to read four articles and write responses accordingly in the second term of their first year.Besides,every response should be given at least one peer review.And their efforts will be scored by both responses and peer review.This study considers the assignment as a reference,namely,the teacher's score as a variable and the grade of peer review as another variable,the total score of CCTDI-CV as the third variable,to explore the correlation between critical thinking disposition and academic paper reading and assessment.The data is analyzed by SPSS 19.0.The quantitative results firstly show that Full-time EFL MEd program students' critical thinking disposition is in a low level and none of them hold strong degree.Then there is no correlation between critical thinking disposition and academic paper reading and assessment performance.Afterwards,interviews,the qualitative methodology,are used to investigate the factors hindering the cultivation of critical thinking disposition in academic paper reading and assessment.The factors can be mainly concluded into three aspects:the material,readers,and teachers.Finally,the study analyzes the reasons of the results,discusses those obstacles and puts forward suggestions accordingly.