Critical thinking skills for reading historical documents

Abstract

Critical thinking skills have received a wide attention among educators in the 20th and the 21st centuries. Almost every educational agenda stresses the need and importance of these skills and set them a major priority in all schools and universities. Yet a task delivered to 3rd year LMD students of civilisation enrolled in the English department at Saad Dahlab University of Blida revealed that these students on the verge of their graduation lack critical thinking skills. This shows that the focus on developing these skills is absent in the civilisation course where students are supposed to build up the skills that enable them evaluate historical information. From here emerged the need to set forth an experimental research that aims at investigating whether infusing an explicit instruction in critical thinking elements and critical reading strategies into a first year LMD American Civilisation course develops the critical thinking skills of freshman students of English enrolled at Saad Dahlab University of Blida. The present experimental research is composed of four chapters. The review of the literature presented in the first chapter explores the concept of critical thinking and reveals that developing students' critical thinking skills is highly praised by educators and researchers. The second chapter of this thesis discusses the methodology followed in this research. An experimental design is adopted for the present one-semester research with randomly selected one experimental group which received the experimental treatment and one control group which did not receive such treatment. Both groups received a questionnaire, a test and a task at the beginning and again at the end of the semester. Chapter two also discusses data analysis procedures. Both descriptive and inferential statistics were run with assistance of the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (version 17.0) to analyze the data obtained from the three research instruments (questionnaire, test and task) and determine whether experimental students' critical thinking skills improved due to the treatment they received. Chapter three reports and discusses the results obtained from the research instruments (questionnaire, test and task). The results demonstrate significant differences in experimental and control group's performance. The experimental group performed higher than the control group, thus revealing an improvement in experimental students' critical thinking skills that can be attributed to the instruction they received over a semester period. These results confirm the effectiveness of critical thinking instruction in developing students' abilities to think critically. The last chapter of this research concludes with some suggested recommendations and pedagogical implications which highlight the importance of integrating an instruction for critical thinking into civilisation classes with the aim of developing students' critical thinking skills.