New Horizons in Education

Abstract

Background: The importance of critical thinking has long been recognized. In recognition of its importance, the Prime Minister of Singapore in 1997 brought up the notion of “Thinking Schools, Learning Nations”. Since its inception, the Ministry of Education has developed thinking packages for schools. However, students often fail to use the thinking skills they are taught. This study investigated the impact of directed viewing-thinking activity on students’ critical thinking.

Aims: To investigate if students’ critical thinking skills can be improved after attending the series of DVTA lessons and find out students’ perceptions of the DVTA lessons.

Sample: Students participating in the study were Secondary 3 students taking Higher Chinese from one of the researcher’s class. All 18 students were present throughout the six lessons. These students were all females between 14 to 15 years of age, coming from a traditional English school.

Method: Pre and post argumentative essay tests were administered to the whole class to test for the difference in the students’ critical thinking skills before and after the students had attended the DVTA lessons. The argumentative essays are judged for two different types of critical thinking skills: ability to evaluate the alternatives and the ability to defend the conclusion on a scale of 1–5. The score represents the level of critical thinking skills the students have displayed in their essays. A questionnaire was also used to find out what the students perceived they have learnt from the DVTA lessons.

Results: Based on the given conditions, the study tends to agree that students perceive DVTA lessons very positively, and DVTA has a positive impact on the students’ critical thinking skills.

Conclusion: Although we may not be able to conclude for sure that DVTA has impacted positively on the students’ critical thinking skills but the findings may be useful to Chinese teachers who are interested in integrating thinking skills in their lesson.

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