Abstract:

This paper aims to discuss the advantages and challenges of designing interdisciplinary research between education and psychology to study educational phenomena. We will present the methodological process used in a research project carried out in Angola, Brazil, and Portugal on the development of critical thinking in secondary education through the teaching of the Portuguese language.

The main objective of the project was to understand the pedagogical practices of Portuguese language teachers, as well as the evidence of critical thinking learning in final-year secondary school students. A second objective was to design and test an experimental task on visual recognition of words and objects measured by electroencephalography (EEG) to explore the patterns of brain activation during the processing of verbal and non-verbal information. To achieve these objectives, the methodology was designed from an interdisciplinary perspective, combining tools and analysis techniques from education, psychology, and cognitive neuroscience.

The instruments used were the curriculum guidelines of Angola, Brazil, and Portugal, the annual lesson plans of Portuguese language teachers from the same countries, and a critical thinking assessment test. The stimuli for the experimental task were selected from previous studies of words with a high frequency of use in the Portuguese lexicon and familiarity (Cameirão et al., 2010) and objects (Verma et al., 2015) which include different visual figures comprising objects and non-objects (visual figures without naming). Superlab 4.5 software was used to present the stimuli and Brain Products Liveamp 32 channels was used to record the brain's electrical activity.

The use of such different instruments allowed us to gain a deeper understanding of the whole process of developing a type of learning, namely the critical thinking skill, from its declaration in the curriculum guidelines, its implementation in schools by teachers to its final destination, the evidence of the result assessed in the students' performance. For this project, another advantage of using an interdisciplinary methodology was that it brought to light the links between the structure of language and the structure of cognitive action.

The challenges of using interdisciplinary methodologies are having a large amount of data to analyze, finding epistemological similarities in disciplines from different domains, combining analysis techniques, and coherently presenting the results.

Keywords:

Interdisciplinary design, Education, Psychology, Critical thinking, Portuguese language.