A Study On The Assessment Of Eighth Grade Students' Critical Thinking Based On Reading Literary Texts

Critical Thinking is an important force for social progress in the knowledge economy.Many Western countries,led by the United States,have incorporated critical thinking into their formal curriculum.Eighth graders are in the critical period of thinking formation and development,but in China's primary and secondary school classrooms,especially in language reading teaching,the cultivation of critical thinking is still in the initial stage of "easy to know and difficult to do" and insufficient practical exploration.The multiple meanings and openness of literary texts are highly compatible with the characteristics of discursive thinking,and have a unique value for cultivating discursive thinking.This study pinpoints the characteristics of eighth-grade students' discursive thinking development through field assessments,and provides solid evidence and improvement strategies for diagnosing and improving reading instruction.The study compares the research results related to critical thinking and assessment at home and abroad,refers to the existing structural framework of critical thinking,draws on international experience in reading assessment,reads the curriculum standards and seeks opinions from subject experts,and constructs a propositional framework for reading assessment in three aspects: questioning and inference,appreciation and evaluation,and generation and reflection.Then,two literary texts were selected and formally tested in urban and rural schools in different regions after the pre-test questions were developed,reviewed by experts,revised in one round,30 people were tested and 6people were interviewed,the test data were analyzed,and revised in the second round.203 valid samples were collected.Using Excel and SPSS software to analyze the data,the reliability of the formal test was 0.833,and the discrimination of each test question reached the excellent standard.The results showed that the eighth-grade students' performance on critical thinking in reading literary texts was slightly negative,and the number of students with low and medium scores was high;there was an imbalance in the development of students' critical thinking between schools,and for the three schools tested in this study,students in urban schools in developed regions performed much better than those in rural schools and urban schools in less developed regions in their own regions,and rural schools in developed regions performed slightly better than urban schools in less developed regions;high There is a significant difference between the reading performance of students in the high and low groups,with students in the high group performing the least well in the element of "generation and reflection" and needing focused attention,while students in the low group are not optimistic not only in their critical thinking but also in their basic reading ability;there is a significant gender difference in students' reading performance in critical thinking of literary texts,with girls performing better than boys in all elements.There is a significant gender difference in students' performance in reading literary texts for critical thinking,with girls performing better than boys in all elements.Specifically,eighth graders have a strong desire for expression,are willing to learn and accept new things,and can actively search for evidence in reading literary texts,evaluate and analyze texts in a relatively dialectical way,and have the potential to develop critical thinking;the main problems include a weak sense of questioning,a lack of strategy in questioning,confused reasoning,inappropriate sequence of evidence presentation,a tendency of test-taking in language appreciation,weak evaluation ability,difficulty in applying one to the other,and a weak thinking structure.The main problems include low awareness of questioning,lack of strategy in questioning,confusion in reasoning,inappropriate sequence of evidence presentation,tendency of test-taking in language appreciation,weakness in evaluation ability,difficulty in making a response,single structure of thinking,inability to form connections,superficial reflection and lack of profound thinking.Finally,based on the analysis of the research results,we propose teaching improvement strategies.The first is to eliminate the superstition of authority and teach text questioning strategies;the second is to implement multiple dialogue teaching and focus on the improvement of thinking quality;the third is to root the characteristics of literary texts and explore the contradictions and conflicts in the texts;the fourth is to teach according to the material and improve the relevance of cultivating discriminatory thinking.