STUDENTS’ IMPROVEMENT OF CRITICAL THINKING SKILLS VIA DEBATE ACTIVITY

Abstract

Critical thinking has always been an inspiring topic that many educators, teachers and researchers endeavor to deeply cultivate in. Likewise, debate has been considered one of the most effective in-class activity to help students foster critical thinking in general and critical thinking skills in particular. Deeply concerning about this issue, researcher decided to conduct a study title “Students’ improvement of critical thinking skills via debate activity”. The objective of this research is to explore the critical thinking skills used by students in the debate activity and their improvement of those skills under students’ perception. The design adopted was survey and questionnaire was chosen as the fundamental data collection method. Additionally, observation and interview were employed so that the research problem could be viewed from various aspects; hence, the validity as well as credibility of the results was heightened. The study yielded some significant findings in response to the proposed questions. As students perceived, they could use all critical thinking skills namely interpretation, analysis, evaluation, inference, explanation and self-regulation in while-debate process in general and abilities within each skill in particular. Yet there existed differences between students’ perception and teachers’ and researcher’s observation in terms of used abilities which resulted from the invisibility nature of thinking process. Additionally, all of these abilities were found to be improved very little or moderately because it was proved that critical thinking skills could not be built up very quickly just after one or two debates. Besides improved aspects concerning critical thinking skills, three other outstanding unimproved ones were identified as time management, interaction with audience and identification of focal points in an argument. Basing on these findings, some implications were drawn to strengthen critical thinking development for students and enhance the quality of debate activity. Moreover, limitations of the researcher were also presented together with some suggestions for further research relating to the domain of critical thinking and debate activity.