Article
An Act of Translation: The Need to Understand Students' Understanding of Critical Thinking in the Undergraduate Classroom
The Journal of Effective Teaching
(2008)
Abstract
This article extends and expands the existing literature on critical thinking (CT) by both
establishing the need for more student-centered research on the topic and reporting on
the findings of a CT research project with two central, related goals: 1) To record and
analyze undergraduate students’ definition of CT and 2) To create an easy-to-use instrument
that can assist faculty members across many disciplines identify and understand
their students’ use of the term so as to improve both teaching and learning. In this
article an overview of the limits of existing CT research is followed by a discussion of
the project’s three, related phases and the initial findings of each. Central to our task is
improved classroom teaching.
In Phase I an open-ended two-question questionnaire was given to students enrolled in
sociology and interdisciplinary courses in two departments during the 2005-2006 academic
year (N = 157). In the first question, students were asked simply to “define CT”.
A qualitative analysis of the data revealed not only wide variation in undergraduate students’
use and understanding of the term generally but also wide variation among students
in any single classroom. Using the most common student-generated definitions of
CT from the survey data, in Phase II we developed and piloted a classroom-ready instrument
designed to allow faculty to quickly and simply assess their students’ understanding
of the term “CT”. Faculty who piloted the instrument in Phase III generally
found it to be user-friendly and pedagogically valuable. Our overall findings suggest
both the need to continue student-centered research in the area of CT and the potential
pedagogical value of a student-centered classroom instrument such as the one we created
Keywords
- Critical thinking,
- student centered,
- assessment tool,
- teaching
Disciplines
Publication Date
January 1, 2008
Citation Information
Tiffany Gayle Chenault and Elizabeth Duclos-Orsello. "An Act of Translation: The Need to Understand Students' Understanding of Critical Thinking in the Undergraduate Classroom" The Journal of Effective Teaching Vol. 8 Iss. 2 (2008) p. 5 - 20 Available at: http://works.bepress.com/tiffany-chenault/3/