AN ANALYSIS OF THE INFLUENCE OF UNIVERSITY EDUCATORS ON THE LEVEL OF CRITICAL THINKING SKILLS OF LEARNERS

Education has been identified as a basic necessity for every human being and that places educational institutions at centre stage of delivering this basic necessity. The institutions of higher learning have been gradually increasing their annual intakes of students in an effort to improve the quantities of people who receive education. The South African government has also designed some interventions and frameworks of implementation to try and support educational institutions starting from early stages. Such interventions have seen an improvement in the number of graduates being produced year after year. On a sad note, this improvement has not translated into a significant improvement in the availability of special skilled labour. South African Universities have been blamed for largely producing graduates who do not fit in the industry. Lack of critical thinking has been identified as the biggest weakness of a lot of graduates. This explicitly demands responses from Universities in the form of teaching methodologies that address short comings of critical thinking. For this to be successful, educators should use teaching methods that instil critical thinking to their students. This paper investigates the influence that University lecturers have on the level of critical thinking of students. The research used the mixed methods approach as it addresses the limitations or gaps left by the two traditional methods, the quantitative and the qualitative. The study was limited to lecturers at Walter Sisulu University. The findings shockingly revealed that majority of the lecturers still teach using rote learning methods. 81% of exam papers set had no questions that required critical thinking or independent thinking. The findings also show a significant correlation between lecturer’s education background and the teaching approach. The paper concludes with recommendations on how to improve critical thinking skills of learners.