Abstract:

The rhythm and ongoing events of modern life promote and inevitably encourage to educate young people working independently, trying to accomplish their education by acquiring new knowledge interrelating with the already existing one. For this purpose, it is necessary to provide cognitive process activation, increase the necessity for knowledge acquisition, and develop quick and smart thinking in the school period. These are the skills successfully used in practice even after the school graduation in combination with the knowledge transfer. Evidently, it is necessary to establish a proper school-teacher-student communication and argumentative consideration presented from all sides and to all directions. Students’ critical thinking development serves the advancement and perfection of these skills. Therefore, one of the main objectives of the National Curriculum is the development of thinking skills.

Critical thinking is an argumentative assessment of different opinions. It involves the following stages: the initial review of the issue related information, finding arguments and counterarguments for creating the decision making bases, making the initial conclusions, consider other possible considerations for further issue clarification leading to the final conclusion.

In order to develop students’ critical thinking, it is important to have a sense of responsibility for listening other people and considering their opinion, having ability to state own position and protect it; to evaluate adequately own opinion and the opinion of others; ability to recognize own mistakes and retreating if it is nesessary. In order to activate critical thinking, it is important to encourage students to answers to provide answers for the following questions such as "Why?", "from where?" and "what for?". These questions involve students in certain types of thinking process such as understanding, confrontation, argumentation, etc. In this kind of procedure, a student is involved in diverse cognitive activities. In other words, a student uses different thinking skills to solve a task required by a teacher.

The paper discusses various learning strategies promoting educated critically-minded generation. We present the study results revealing the role and importance of teaching strategies in formation of different competences in school graduates. It presents the advantages of specific strategies used in the process of critically thinking young people education.

Keywords:

Active learning, argumentative discussion, critical thinking, cognitive schemes, cooperative learning, research skills, student oriented teaching.