Improved metacognitive thinking can impact student’s success. A novel homework method called Solved Problem Analysis (SPA) was developed with the intent to foster metacognitive thinking. It was hypothesized that supporting metacognition would lead to increased performance on in-class exams and the ACS final exam. Results showed SPA was effective at increasing performance on both. In order to more directly measure student’s metacognitive thinking, a knowledge survey was implemented to measure the difference between student’s perceived understanding of the material and their actual performance. These knowledge surveys showed students were able to predict how much of the material they understood. Monitoring one’s thinking is an important part of metacognition. This cognitive monitoring can be mimicked in study group interactions. The effect of self-assembled study groups on student exam performance was also examined, where it was found that self-assembled study groups did not effectively increase exam performance.

In a digital world where algorithms and mathematical models impact students’ lives and society as a whole, it is important to learn critical thinking to understand and reflect upon what is happening. How will students perceive an inclusion of mathematical models that affect society in their mathematics lessons? Prior research shows that mathematical modelling is a valuable skill. However, critical thinking regarding models is currently not included in the curriculum. The theory in the study is based on critical mathematics and will include four different types of knowledge regarding mathematical modelling: pure mathematical knowledge, technical knowledge, reflective knowledge and extra-mathematical knowledge. In this study a field study was conducted in two Swedish upper secondary schools, together with a survey and focus group interviews. The study found that students’ experiences during the lessons show resemblance with critical mathematics while working with mathematical models and that the students are capable of evaluating the impact that the models have on society. The student’s experiences working with mathematical models that affect society alludes to a possibility to work towards including democracy in the mathematical classroom. This study focuses on the students’ perspective, further research regarding the teachers’ perspective could provide additional insight.

In the field of instructional technology critical thinking is valued both as a practice for those in the field and as a skill or habit to teach and measure. However, traditional conceptions of critical thinking are limited in their usefulness and restricted to particular kinds of thinking and reasoning. Conceptions of critical thinking in instructional technology are dominated by these traditional perspectives. Missing is a substantive dialogue on the nature of critical thinking. despite the fact that such dialogue is a part of critical thinking scholarship outside of instructional technology. One of the primary limitations of traditional critical thinking is the failure to emphasize the recognition and analysis of underlying assumptions. Assumptions underlie every theory and practice in any field of discipline. Critical thinking itself cannot be practiced without the influence of assumptions, both acknowledged and implicit. In order for a critical thinking approach to facilitate analysis of assumptions it must be sensitive to the characteristics of assumptions and the roles assumptions play in everyday life. For this thesis, I propose a model of critical thinking that involves principles and practices that aid the professional in recognizing and evaluating assumptions, revising assumptions when needed, and adapting practices to align with assumptions. Such critical thinking in instructional technology has the potential to improve the practice of current theories, advance theories in the future, and guide practitioners in decision-making.

Educators and practicing professionals in many fields emphasize the importance of critical thinking for effective decision-making. However, critical thinking skills are not usually directly taught in traditional educational settings. A subset of these skills, identifying logical fallacies, could be amenable to direct instruction using procedures that establish conditional discriminations, such as equivalence-based instruction (EBI). EBI procedures have been shown to be effective and efficient when teaching a variety of skills, including the identification of logical fallacies, when compared with no-instruction and self-instruction control groups. The purpose of this study is to compare the effectiveness of web-based EBI procedures to a more traditional lecture-based instruction format, with and without requiring participants to actively respond to the material, for teaching undergraduate students to identify logical fallacies. Participants were assigned to one of three groups: equivalence-based instruction, lecture-based instruction or lecture-based instruction with active responding. Using a pretest-train-posttest design, performance on multiple-choice tests that target relations among logical fallacy names, descriptions, and examples were compared. The results of this study suggest that EBI is an effective instruction method for teaching college students to identify logical fallacies. When compared to both lecture-based instruction teaching methods, EBI resulted in consistently higher posttest scores following instruction and more consistent acquisition of the nonprogrammed relations (i.e., BA, CA, CB, BC).

Lisa Delpit points out that when process pedagogues ignore grammar in their teaching of writing, they further the achievement gap between students of a variety of backgrounds. She then argues for a grammar/skills based pedagogy rather than process pedagogy in order to bridge the language differences students bring to the classroom. On the other hand, progressive-minded educators deeply question if skills pedagogy could ever transform unjust social conditions and relationships. Grammar pedagogy may potentially empower an individual's chance at social mobility, but what about the need for social change and respecting language diversity? Both sides of this important debate assume that grammar is a skill and that to teach grammar to writers is skills-based teaching. I challenge these assumptions in my qualitative teacher inquiry, prompted by this question: What difference would it make if the way I practiced grammar became more in tune with my beliefs about critical literacy practice? My dissertation takes up this question by arguing for a curriculum that links grammar and critical thinking and reporting on a qualitative study of this curriculum in action in my Basic Writing classroom. For this curriculum, I consciously engage theoretical micro-perspectives informed by a social semiotic view of grammar and language, explained in my dissertation as Critical Grammar. Such theoretical ground builds on the pedagogical grammars of Martha Kolln and Laura Micciche as well as the critical classroom and research practices of Min-Zhan Lu and Roz Ivanic. I then research Critical Grammar, my theoretical term, through a case study approach to my classroom, specifically through inductive, comparative analysis of how writers discuss sentence-level options and drawn on arhetorical, rhetorical, and critical reasoning in sentence workshops. My case study methodology helps me discover the effects of such discussions on a writer's final draft. Each case traces the process of composing and revising the sentence from first to final draft of an essay, drawing from the writer's process reflections, feedback from me and peers, and class workshop discussions of the sentence. In this way, the mini-cases capture how writers authorized themselves and responded to each other in ethical and resourceful ways. These case studies challenge notions that a teacher's knowledge of grammar should be in service of identifying error patterns and teaching editing skills. In sentence workshops, writers take responsibility for their sentence-level choices and authorize themselves through their ideas, often resulting in dynamic class discussions that inform their writing in a range of ways, the least of which is error reduction. In discussing choices of wording or arrangement, for instance, they would link to issues of a writer's ethos, questions of who/what has the authority for setting language standards, and cultural beliefs. At the same time, based in this research, errors were found to be implicit in Critical Grammar, leading toward further consideration concerning the function of error in Critical Grammar pedagogy. Finally, Critical Grammar was determined to be most successful when it complemented the ideological aspects to an existing curricular perspective on language.

This thesis aims to study the use of Critical System Heuristic (CSH) in the requirements engineering (RE) process of a student software project. We have studied a software project within the framework of the TDDD96 course at Linköping University. The project consisted of a group of computer science students working with a representative from a company. As part of the course, the students had done the sustainability exercise SusAF, in which they evaluated their project based on multiple sustainability metrics. We have conducted one round of interviews with the RE student, the company representative, and an expert in the area. The answers were encoded and mapped to 12 CSH questions before being presented in the Ideal map table. The results produced by CSH show the many benefits of integrating CSH into the course. We have proposed different ways of integrating CSH with the SusAF exercise. From the result, we realized the importance of consulting a third party that could provide an outside perspective on different issues. However, an essential aspect of using CSH is to consult the appropriate party. To this end, we found that CSH could be used internally to point in the right direction.

В работе обсуждается проблема дефиниции критического мышления, описывается структура критического мышления. Также обсуждаются различные виды когнитивных ошибок, выделяются 11 основных разновидностей. Представлен дизайн методики «Опросник когнитивных искажений». / The paper discusses the problem of defining critical thinking, describes the structure of critical thinking. Various types of cognitive errors are also discussed, and 11 major varieties are highlighted. The design of the “Cognitive distortion questionnaire” technique is presented.

学位プログラム名: 京都大学大学院思修館 / 京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(総合学術) / 甲第21933号 / 総総博第8号 / 新制||総総||1(附属図書館) / 京都大学大学院総合生存学館総合生存学専攻 / (主査)教授 積山 薫, 教授 杉本 均, 教授 山口 栄一 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Philosophy / Kyoto University / DGAM

The purpose of this quasi-experimental, mixed-methods study was to address the gap in understanding regarding second language (L2) comprehension of stories by using a taxonomical approach based on Anderson and Krathwohl’s (2001) revised taxonomy that includes multiple levels of cognitive processing to provide insight into L2 learners’ depth of comprehension. In addition, this study investigated the impact of reading, reading-while-listening, and listening input modalities as it applies to story comprehension. L2 comprehension studies where all three of these input methods are compared are scarce. Finally, the effect of input type on learner affect—task enjoyment and perceived task difficulty—was explored. No previous mixed methods L2 comprehension studies have accounted for all the above variables. The participants (N = 134, 85 male and 49 female students) of the quantitative aspect of this study were Japanese university students who were streamed into the university’s reading and writing or listening and speaking classes. At the time of the study, they were first- and second-year, non-English majors taking English courses as a general university requirement at a private university in western Japan. Participants from six intact classes were tasked with reading two chapters, reading-while-listening to two chapters, and listening to two chapters of a six-chapter graded reader. Using a Latin squares design, each class received a different input method at the beginning, middle, and end of each story. Three 250-headword, CEFR level 1 short stories of similar lengths from the Oxford Dominos series were used for each participant group. The participants received short, bilingual vocabulary lists for vocabulary that fell outside of the first 1,000 BNC/COCA high-frequency words of English prior to receiving each story. After finishing two chapters using one of the above three input modalities, the texts were returned to me and the participants answered bilingual remember questions of the factual recall subtype, understand questions of the inferencing subtype, and evaluate questions of the judging or critique subtypes based on Anderson and Krathwohl’s (2001) revised taxonomy. They then rated task difficulty and task enjoyment. Both the remember and understand questions were four-option multiple-choice questions, while the evaluate questions required written responses in Japanese. To ensure task time equivalency, the participants received two repeated listenings at approximately 138–157 words per minute (WPM) for the reading-while-listening and listening tasks. The participants were given approximately 18 minutes to complete each of the three chapters and 10 minutes to answer questions. Using data from Rasch person measures, a series of mixed model analyses were used to assess the participants’ performances on remember, understand, and evaluate comprehension questions as mediated by input modality. Input modality—reading, reading-while-listening, and listening—was the independent variable, while the remember, understand, and evaluate comprehension questions made up the dependent variables. The New Vocabulary Levels Test (NVLT) scores were used as the covariate. The results indicated that the participants scored higher overall on the remember questions (M = 54.06) than on the understand questions (M = 52.62) or the evaluate questions (M = 49.31). Regarding task-type findings, the reading and reading-while-listening tasks resulted in significantly better comprehension than listening tasks but were not significantly different from one another for remember and understand comprehension questions. For evaluate comprehension questions, all three inputs resulted in significantly different comprehension with reading resulting in the highest comprehension, followed by reading-while-listening, and then listening. The NVLT was a significant predictor of comprehension at all levels, but it had small R2 values. Listening tasks resulted in significantly lower scores than both the reading and reading-while-listening input conditions for all three comprehension levels. In addition, the participants rated that they perceived the reading-while-listening and listening tasks to be more difficult than reading tasks. Reading and reading-while-listening tasks were rated as more enjoyable than listening tasks. After the quantitative data were gathered, qualitative interviews were conducted to better investigate the research hypotheses and the quantitative findings. Six participants were from the same university as the quantitative sample (N = 6, 1 male and 5 female) and four participants were from another nearby university (N = 4, 3 male and 1 female). These participants completed the second text, The Bottle Imp (Stevenson, 2008), by reading Chapters 1–2, reading-while-listening to Chapters 3–4, and listening to Chapters 5–6 in the same manner as the quantitative groups except they did not follow a Latin squares design. After the completion of each two-chapter section, the participants provided verbal recalls to ensure that they correctly performed the task and to gain insight into what was understood from the text. Next, they answered comprehension questions and gave task enjoyment and task difficulty ratings. Finally, the participants answered interview questions designed to clarify their thoughts about the tasks. Verbal recalls and interviews were audio-recorded, and the interviews were transcribed and coded based on Saldaña (2016). The mixed-methods results identified a gap between Japanese L2 learners’ ability to comprehend listening to texts in English compared to the reading and reading-while-listening conditions. This gap persisted regardless of the levels of critical thinking required. The participants also performed more poorly on tasks as the critical thinking levels increased. Receptive vocabulary knowledge as measured by the NVLT was found to predict comprehension; however, because the graded readers were typically lexically appropriate for the participants, it had small R2 values. More lexically complex texts might have resulted in the NVLT correlating more strongly with comprehension. Finally, listening tasks were perceived to be more difficult and less enjoyable than reading. These findings suggest that input method has a significant influence on L2 learners’ ability to complete comprehension tasks at three levels of Anderson and Krathwohl’s (2001) revised taxonomy. The bulk of comprehension test items are from the bottom two levels of the taxonomy, so educators and researchers should consider the role that input method plays. Additionally, L2 learners might benefit from instruction that builds listening comprehension and listening fluency skills. As critical thinking demands increased, comprehension scores decreased regardless of the input method. This finding aligns with Anderson and Krathwohl’s Revised taxonomy, which posits that a critical thinking hierarchy exists and that a degree of proficiency with lower levels of the hierarchy is necessary for the successful completion of higher-level tasks. Educators should consider how critical thinking contributes to task difficulty and language learners should be provided with language tasks that work to improve critical thinking skills. / Applied Linguistics

The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of problem-based learning, blended problem-based learning, and traditional lecture teaching methods on students’ academic achievement and self-regulation. Specifically, student’s motivation orientation, use of learning strategies, and critical thinking dispositions were assessed. The research design for this study was a quasi-experimental pretest/posttest design. There were 90 undergraduate education majors who participated in the study. There were 29 students who participated in the problem-based learning group, 30 students participated in the blended problem based learning group, 31 students participated in the traditional group. Convenience sampling was used for this study. The findings in this study indicated that the students who were taught via the blended problem based learning teaching methodology scored significantly higher on the comprehensive exam for academic achievement and subcategories of the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire than the problem based learning and the traditional lecture group. There were no significant differences between groups for critical thinking dispositions on the California Critical Thinking Dispositions Inventory. Overall, the blended problem based learning teaching methodology did have a significantly positive impact on students’ academic achievement and self-regulation skills.