A Comparative Study Of Critical Thinking Between Non-english Major Graduate Students Of Arts And Science

As the awareness of the significance of critical thinking has grown,researches on the cultivation of critical thinking in teaching have gradually become the focus of attention in recent years.It is necessary on contemporary educators to cultivate good critical thinkers.By combining and summarizing the relevant literature,it can be seen that the related researches have been focused on English majors,most of which take college students as participants.On the contrary,researches on the critical thinking of non-English major graduate students are far from adequate,and comparative studies between non-English major graduate students of arts and science are particularly rare.From two aspects of critical thinking dispositions and critical thinking skills,this study investigated the critical thinking of non-English major graduate students of arts and science.Through comparing and analyzing,the purpose is to explore whether there are differences in critical thinking between graduate students of arts and science after training in two different academic directions,thus putting forward some feasible pedagogical suggestions on the improvement of non-English graduate students’ critical thinking in English teaching.It is hoped that the results of this study would arouse the attention of academia and attach significance to the development of the critical thinking of non-English major graduates.Two research questions can be summarized as follows:1)Are there any differences in critical thinking dispositions between non-English major graduate students of arts and science?2)Are there any differences in critical thinking skills between non-English major graduate students of arts and science?Participants involved in this study are composed of 88 first-year non-English major graduate students in Shandong University,Shandong Normal University and Shandong Agricultural University.The Chinese version of Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory revised by Wen Qiufang and Critical Thinking Skills Test revised by Luo Qingxu are employed to assess participants’ critical thinking.All validdata collected from the questionnaires and tests are analyzed with SPSS 17.0.The major findings can be concluded as follows:1)In terms of critical thinking dispositions,the mean score of science graduates is higher than that of arts in general,but their difference has not reached a significant level.As for specific dimensions,participants of science perform better than arts in analyticity,inquisitiveness,self-confidence and truth-seeking;on the contrary,arts graduate students show more strengths in cognitive maturity and open-mindedness than science;there is no significant difference in justice-orientedness and systematicity between two groups.2)Differences between graduate students of arts and science in critical thinking skills are significant,and participants of science perform better than arts.In addition,among three dimensions,participants of science graduate students perform better than arts in analysis and inference.On the contrary,participants of arts have better performance than the other group in evaluation,but there is no significant difference.Based on the findings,some pedagogical implications for cultivating students’ critical thinking in graduate English teaching are put forward by the author.In addition,the limitations of the study and some suggestions for further studies are also proposed.