| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立花蓮師範學院 === 國小科學教育研究所 === 90 === Abstract
The aim of education is to develop sound personality of civics. Many researches also point out that individual critical thinking can help achieve the goal. Nowadays, the new Nine-Year Integrating Curriculum, which will carry on in the science subject soon, emphasizes the development of scientific literacy. Critical thinking skills are important indicators to ensure whether students achieve scientific literacy. In other words, critical thinking is one of the important goals in education.
According to literature review, the researcher finds that most researches of critical thinking are quantitative studies with regards to how students’ critical thinking have been developed in each stage. However, this research is to discuss and record the feasibilities and processes of critical thinking teaching for the fourth graders by action research.
The researcher plans a set of critical thinking mechanism based on concepts of critical thinking and related teaching theories. The researcher selects “critical thinking disposition” and “critical thinking skills” as two factors of this research. The first factor can be divided as four aspects such as “Truth Seeking”, “Open Minded”, “Self Refraction”, and “Self Confidence”. The second factor can be divided as “Interaction with Others”, “Questions of Clarification”, “Information of Judgement ”, and “Inference”.
During the teaching process, the researcher has further understood about students’ critical thinking by the following five ways: feedback notes, tape recording, learning diary, learning process sheets, and semi-structured interview.
The results of this research show that the critical thinking mechanism developed by this research could efficiently increase the conversation in class and put students-centered critical thinking in practice. On the aspect of “truth seeking”, students can study more on topic issues by inquiry technique. On the aspects of “open-minded” and “self-refraction”, it can be efficiently improved by students’ reflection and review of classroom.Each student’s personality is the main factor influences self-confidence. In order to understand and increase the self-confidence of students, we take advantage of learning diary to record what and interview them afterwards. Besides, the critical thinking mechanism can improve their interaction with others and improve their skills in inference. Furthermore, it could promote students’ classroom participation and help students focus more on topic issuees. In terms of question-clarification and information judgment, students’ prior knowledge and personal experiences are two main influential factors.
This research proposes several suggestions as following:
1. Critical thinking should be integrated into the present teaching in the classroom under the trend of student-centered education revolution.
2. When conducting critical thinking teaching ,student’s individual differences must be taken into consideration, and some scaffolding for students when needed should be supported.
3. The publishers of textbooks should provide some material about critical thinking when textbooks are to be designed and developed.
4. While conducting assessment, students’ learning portfolio regarding to critical thinking should be considered. Secondly, teachers must guide students to appreciate the value of critical thinking in education and aware of the essence of knowledge. Thirdly, teachers can take good use on the learning diary as a communication vehicle between students and teachers.
5. Future research could develop critical thinking questionnaire for different stages of students. Meanwhile, quantitative combined with qualitative researches are encouraged to understand and examine students’ learning results better.
6. A longer period of research time is suggested. It is also important to look into more factors that interfere students’ learning in critical thinking environment. It is also suggested to investigate the relationship between the critical thinking teaching model and academic achievement
Keywords： critical thinking disposition, critical thinking skills, critical thinking teaching,
action research, science curriculum
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