Abstract:

Understanding the importance of 21st-century skills such as critical thinking, self-direction, and problem-solving is vital for students to achieve learning goals and increase school reputation in the competitive educational context. The critical thinking, self-direction, and problem-solving competencies are necessary for students' success in education; however, there are still numerous debates about their definition and social functions. This study aims to investigate the significance of 21st-century skills such as critical thinking on how the skills influence the student's academic success and personality growth. This study reviews the current pedagogical problems resulted from exam-oriented teaching and learning and high-stake testing and provides a practical curriculum implementation framework such as backward design. This study also explores the educational issues such as policy, philosophy, and cultural impacts in education. Since the Chinese educational environment tended to focus on testing results with the exam-oriented assessment, this study aims to find out the possible suggestions for students, teachers, school principals, and parents to promote critical thinking, self-direction, and problem-solving skills in learning and teaching. Generic qualitative research was employed to explore the importance of critical thinking, self-direction, and problem-solving in student academic success and lifelong learning. The primary data were collected from fifteen participants, including teachers (N=7) and students (N=7) through observation, document analysis, and selected individual interviews from 2017 to 2020. Using the two-cycle analysis approach discovered the major emergent themes and subthemes and found out how the importance of critical thinking, self-direction, and problem-solving skills influence the student's academic performance. Findings also showed that teachers need to use the backward design to implement the current course curriculum and found that critical thinking helped students build their personality, know their potential talents, improve their communication skills, and integrate the school knowledge and ability for students' integrity. The study highlighted that teachers need to emphasize critical thinking, self-direction, and problem-solving in classroom practice. Therefore, future research explores a mixed comparative research method to discover 21st-century skills in lifelong learning between the US and China. The following research also needs to examine the student's talents through self-rated essential skills of thinking before taking the formal assessment in education recommended.

Keywords:

Critical thinking, 21st century, lifelong learning, exam-oriented teaching, qualitative research.