Developing And Assessing Critical Thinking From An Immersion Approach

Critical thinking is becoming increasingly important in the current society.The latest national English language curriculum highlights the necessity of promoting students' critical thinking.However,traditional English classes do not put enough emphasis on developing students' thinking.Though some scholars have designed strategies to teach critical thinking,these strategies mainly 'infuse' critical thinking in the curriculum.Since it is unlikely for teachers to continually 'infuse' thinking skills in regular English class,these strategies cannot be generalized in real practice.Therefore,an immersion approach,which synthesizes Bloom's taxonomy model questioning system,group texts reading and cooperative learning,is designed in this study to help students achieve a sustainable critical thinking development.The immersion approach adopts Bloom's hierarchical questioning system to ensure that thinking happens in the content-based context,which makes up for the defect of infusion approach that teaches thinking separately.Besides,contrary to the infusion approach where teaching is based on limited reading resource,the immersion approach applies group texts reading to the class which helps students access multiple viewpoints.Moreover,the immersion approach uses cooperative learning to create a dialectical and interactive context.This is opposed to infusion approach in which teacher-dominated model still exists.In this case,students have greater chance to think critically through student-student interaction in the immersion approach.To testify the effects of the immersion approach,the study assesses students'development in both critical thinking disposition and critical thinking skills before and after the one-month intervention.The widely adopted CCTDI(the California Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory)and UF/QCTS(the Qualitative Florida Scale for Critical Thinking Skills)are employed as the assessment tools to evaluate the participants' critical thinking disposition and skills respectively.In the study,the CCTDI and the UF/QCTS are modified to better suit the Chinese high school participants in the hope that these assessment tools are of high validity.Based on the study,it is discovered that the immersion approach effectively improves participants' critical thinking in both disposition and skills and that the rate of increase is much larger in critical thinking skills compared with critical thinking disposition.Under the immersion approach,adoption of Bloom's taxonomy model questioning system positively affects participants' critical thinking skills in 'analysis'and 'evaluation',while application of group texts reading helps participants achieve progress in 'explanation' and 'interpretation'.Cooperative learning also largely benefits critical thinking skills development in terms of 'interpretation','analysis','evaluation'and 'inference'.As the immersion approach integrates critical thinking with the curricular context,it is hoped that it can be generalized to regular English class so as to help students achieve a sustainable critical thinking development.