Abstract:

Fostering critical thinking ability of students is one of the most important educational goals in high school education. Especially, cultivating critical thinking disposition is an essential element and debate education is often introduced as an effective program for this purpose. It is, however, difficult to introduce the debate education into actual high school classes because it needs much time for all the students to participate in the debate. In this study, the authors have proposed an educational program using an internet-based debate support system in order to realize such effective education and applied it to the actual high school education.
The proposed program consists of four phases. In the first phase and the second phase, students obtain basic knowledge and technique of critical thinking through reading a book and an individual exercise. In the third phase, each student makes a presentation on the results of their critical thinking about their own themes. In the last phase, they participate in debate using the debate support system. The system has been developed by the authors and it provides Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) environment for holding debate via the Internet. The features of the system are (a)discussion based on Toulmin model, (b)2 pros and 2 cons (or 3 pros and 3 cons) in one group based on one-to-one discussion and (c)four steps formal description of discussion consisting of first argument, counterargument, rebuttal and second counterargument in order to realize smooth and active discussion.
The proposed program was practiced in a Japanese high school for thirteen weeks in the first semester of 2008 and 438 students of 11 classes participated in the practice. Here, (i)pre-presentation test, (ii)pre-debate test and (iii)post-debate test were conducted using a Japanese critical thinking disposition scale in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed program. The critical thinking disposition scale consists of three factors of “objectivity”, “good-faith” and “inquiring mind”.
As the results of one-way ANOVA, it was found that the factor scores of “objectivity”, “good-faith” and “inquiring mind” significantly increased through the proposed program. As the results of Scheffe's paired comparison, it was also found that the scores of “objectivity” and “good-faith” were improved between (i)pre-presentation and (ii)pre-debate, and between (ii)pre-debate and (iii)post-debate (p<0.05), while that of “inquiring mind” was not significantly improved (p>0.05)..
The results suggest that the proposed program can cultivate critical thinking disposition especially the factors of “objectivity” and “good-faith”. This is because debating needs logical persuasion and faithfully listening to others proposition and these characteristics may cultivate “objectivity” and “good-faith”. However, the improvement of “inquiry mind” was comparatively lower than those of other factors. This is because debating with a given theme and a given position doesn’t essentially stimulate students’ creativity and curiosity which are related to “inquiry mind”.
In conclusion, the effectiveness of the proposed program to cultivate critical thinking disposition was confirmed especially for the factors of “objectivity” and “good-faith”. In the future, the authors would like to propose a new educational program which can improve the critical thinking disposition, not only “objectivity” and “good-faith” but also “inquiring mind”.

Keywords:

Critical thinking disposition, debate, cmc.