Research On The Learning Activity Design And Application Effectiveness For Developing Critical Thinking

Critical thinking is an essencial ability for talents in the 21 st century,which is also important to cultivate advanced thinking such as information literacy and innovative thinking.The study of critical thinking is gaining more and more attention at home and abroad,but the practical research of combining the training of critical thinking and curriculum instruction is rare.With the development of the Internet,online learning is becoming more frequent,and online questioning has great potential for facilitating online discussions and thus developing critical thinking.The purpose of this article is to design learning activities that integrate critical thinking with questioning methods,and to promote the development of critical thinking among college students through peer questioning in online discussions.This article focuses on two research questions: 1)What learning activities are designed to promote the development of critical thinking? 2)Has the student's critical thinking improved after studying? If so,how does it evolved? Taking 34 college students as research objects,this article mainly uses research methods of grounded theory and literature survey to design learning activities,and adopts research methods of pre-post survey and content analysis to analyze the effectiveness of the study.Before the teaching began,this research used a grounded theory to analyze 802 posts from previous online forums,summarized the characteristics of peer questions in online discussions,and construct a framework for peer questions online.This framework includes six items for peer questions and the corresponding sentence patterns and examples,which can provide students with good references for thinking and asking questions.Secondly,based on the literature summary,critical thinking can be divided into at least three perspectives: thinking logic,standard thinking,and thinking process.Among these,the thinking standard and thinking logic are selected as the learning content of critical thinking and the thinking process as the evaluation part.Thirdly,the last two steps of questioning framework and critical thinking are used as learning content and the scaffolding theory as the teaching strategy,and four learning activities are designed in combination with the course teaching practice(cognition of the online discussion questioning framework,the use of critical thinking logic,and understanding of critical thinking,critical thinking-based questioning)and three online discussions.Fourthly,three-stage practice is carried out during the course teaching,and four learning activities and three online discussions are distributed among them;different learning activities are used to enable students to conduct online discussions and peer questions under the premise of learning critical thinking.Finally,the study collects relevant data,and analyzes the critical thinking pretest and posttest through SPSS and Prism,analyze 637 post discourses through content analysis combined with epistemic network analysis.The results show that after one semester of study,the students' critical thinking skills have improved significantly;the results of online discourse analysis show that the students' critical thinking process has significantly changed from the initial stage to the final stage,presenting as developing and changing gradually from loworder to high order.Finally,this article combines data analysis and previous research to discuss the activity design and application effectiveness,explores the possible mechanism of application effectiveness,and proposes further ideas for critical thinking related research.