This study is an exploration of the possibility of pedagogical partnership between low socioeconomic public high school principals and their classroom teachers for the purpose of advancing critical thinking skills and critical consciousness development in their students. This study will explore the viability of these partnerships through the perspectives of associate superintendents, principals, and teachers. The exploration will seek to determine the participants’ willingness to partner pedagogically, their readiness to advance critical thinking and critical consciousness development in their students, and their perception of district and state policies that might help or stand in the way of such development. / text

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Education / Master / Master of Science in Information Technology in Education

The methodology by which to teach these outcomes was not clear. An intervention programme, Philosophy for Children (P4C) is used in some countries across the world to promote thinking. Research across the world has shown that this programme has the ability to enhance the cognitive abilities of learners exposed to it. Stories for Thinking (SFT) is an intervention programme based on the principles of Philosophy for Children and was introduced in some schools in an Education District of the Western Cape. This study investigates the perceptions of Intermediate Phase educators about the implementation of Stories for Thinking in this Education District. Educators were asked their strengths and challenges of the approach, their way of using it and the support they received. A qualitative research method was used and data were gathered to answer the research questions by means of questionnaires and interviews. Research findings indicate that educators perceived that Stories for Thinking was able to enhance the reading ability of the learners, it showed a significant improvement in their confidence levels, and a positive change in their general behaviour. Language was seen as a barrier to learning, but the evidence indicates that the community of inquiry can be used as a tool to overcome some of the barriers. It seems as if educators valued the support from the project leaders. It is concluded that this kind of intervention programme is worth introducing as long as all the role-players play their part and the setting is conducive.

<p>South Africa had a change in government and in education after the 1994 elections. A new curriculum was introduced and some of the underlying critical outcomes were to develop the learners to become critical thinkers. The methodology by which to teach these outcomes was not clear. An intervention programme, Philosophy for Children (P4C) is used in some countries across the world to promote thinking. Research across the world has shown that this programme has the ability to enhance the cognitive abilities of learners exposed to it. Stories for Thinking (SFT) is an intervention programme based on the principles of Philosophy for Children and was introduced in some schools in an Education District of the Western Cape. This study investigates the perceptions of Intermediate Phase educators about the implementation of Stories for Thinking in this Education District. Educators were asked their strengths and challenges of the approach, their way of using it and the support they received. A qualitative research method was used and data were gathered to answer the research questions by means of questionnaires and interviews. Research findings indicate that educators perceived that Stories for Thinking was able to enhance the reading ability of the learners, it showed a significant improvement in their confidence levels, and a positive change in their general behaviour. Language was seen as a barrier to learning, but the evidence indicates that the community of inquiry can be used as a tool to overcome some of the barriers. It seems as if educators valued the support from the project leaders. It is concluded that this kind of intervention programme is worth introducing as long as all the role-players play their part and the setting is conducive.</p>

This thesis is centrally concerned with the current nee-liberal world order and its effects upon society. It is concerned to expose the contradictions and weaknesses within the knowledge systems that underpin our political reality. It considers economics as the determining discourse of neo-liberal politics, analytic biology as its determining discourse of individual persons, and analytic and neo-pragmatist philosophy as its leading systems of thought. In each case it finds a linear rationalism compatible with the determinist materialism of noo-Darwinism, and indeed explicitly invoking Darwin. This seems to vindicate Manuel Castells's fmding of this 'Knowledge Society' as driven by 'an abstract, universal instrumentalism'. The thought systems of this economic liberalism have seen politics subsumed within economics, de-humanising most of the institutions of the earlier Liberal tradition, to the detriment of both freedom and democracy. But it disputes Castells's assumption that this is a necessary reality and finds in neo-liberal education the exception to this dehumanising trend. Revitalised as 'Mode 2' knowledge production, this form of teaching, learning and research is found to be ideally suited to challenge the underpinnings of the very social order which initially produced it. The thesis as a whole is designed to employ Mode 2 methods in order to support this contention. Using this approach it seeks to demonstrate that in place of neo-Darwinism the ideas of the South African natural scientist Eugene Marais, concerning the significance of conscious thought itself within evolution, can provide a more convincing epistemoloy than the behaviourism and materialism of analytic biology. It finds John Maynard Keynes's acceptance of economics as a moral and not a natural science, more logically convincing and more inherently useful for social reconstruction than the current mathematicisation of economic theory. Prevalent philosophical approaches appear to serve only to reinforce the systems of thought already found (and found wanting) in politics, biology and economics. But again these philosophies are shown to be vulnerable to a Mode 2 critique, particularly employing the ontological understanding of the contemporary pragmatist philosopher Joseph Margolis, whose strong version of relativism allows for both bivalent and multivalent truth values more appropriate to understanding the complex realities of ethical and democratic societies. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of Natal, Durban, 2002.

Up to 1998, the Institutes of Nursing in the United Arab Emirates have been using the traditional lecture-based teaching/learning process in their graduate-nursing program. In 1998, however, these Institutes adopted a new approach; namely, the case-based learning (CBL) for the education of their nursing students. This approach emphasizes the use of self-directed and cooperative learning that is supposed to help students increase their critical thinking (CT) level. As the students were experiencing changes in the teaching practices, it was important to determine the effect of the teaching and learning approaches on students' CT abilities, and to describe suggestions needed for improvement. Empirically, very little is known regarding the influence of CBL on a student's CT. The question then remains, as to whether students who have undergone case-based learning, differ significantly in their CT abilities from those who studied in the traditional method. This study investigates the critical thinking skills in relation to two types of nursing educational programs: (a) the traditional teaching and (b) the case-based learning. The professed purpose of the study in hand is to measure and compare the level of critical thinking in participants from each of the two programs. The instrument of measurement guiding this study is the model developed by Facione and Facione (1998). The design has been a comparative descriptive survey. The critical thinking abilities were measured by the CCTST, which was administered to 38 participants from the traditional curriculum and 65 from the case-based learning curriculum who agreed to participate in the study. When the scores were analyzed by using the independent sample 1- test, this study found that, in general, participants from both programs performed badly on the CCTST. Nevertheless, the CBL program participants performed significantly better when compared to the traditional program participants in all aspects of the CCTST. / Thesis (M.Cur.)-University of Natal, Durban, 2001.

This dissertation describes critical participatory action research study aimed at developing the capacity of learners to think critically in the context of a classroom in a South African Secondary school (and beyond). The data were qualitative in nature, and were generated through Govender’s (2008) 1949 short story prescribed for grade 11 in 2010. Informal discussions, classroom observations, semi-structured interviews, critical thinking tasks as well as learners’ assignments were the instruments inductively used for data production, interpretation and analysis. This process was guided by critical questions regarding the tasks’ characteristics, their position in the teaching sequence, the role of the learning environment, and the need to design activities which would effectively promote critical thinking. A reflexive critical paradigm to claims to knowledge particularly in terms of how knowledge emerges through the relationship between the knower and the known, how reality was explained in this study as well as in terms of the ways and means of producing evidence, was adopted. Orthodox Marxism, not approached from an economic deterministic and functionalist perspective was chosen as a theoretical frame for the study. This study was conceptualised in terms of literary works, ideology, historical materialism, dialectical materialism, critical thinking as well as practice. Constructivism as well as Reader Response theories emerged as being most likely to promote success in developing critical thinking skills. These theories were found to be relevant when evaluated against criteria of active engagement and interest by learners, attainability with effort, display of critical thinking traits, and compatibility with the South African curriculum. In these theories an interesting problem is posed at the start of a section, after which direct instruction and learner engagement with the problem run parallel to one another, linked by scaffolding tools which are engaged with both, individually and collaboratively. Data analysis demonstrated that it is possible, employing particular strategies and tasks, to promote the capacity of learners to think critically, even beyond the classroom context, while meeting the curriculum outcomes, although the intense pressure of the curriculum made this a challenging task, it must be acknowledged. Nevertheless, there is still a need of research that would enable learners to realise that literature has no direct relation with reality and that literature cannot produce a utilitarian totalising perspective of reality. In order to write about other things implies that a writer has to stop writing about others. Tasks design characteristics and positioning in the teaching sequence, and the conditions of the learning environment, were found to affect a tasks’ effectiveness at promoting critical thinking. Various teaching strategies in line with tasks that have a potential to promote critical thinking and theories can improve attainability by wider range of learners. / Thesis (M.Ed.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2012.

The purpose of this study was three-fold: to measure the ability of the Medical Explorers case-based curriculum to improve higher order thinking skills; to evaluate the impact of the Medical Explorers case-based curriculum to help students be self directed learners; and to investigate the impact of the Medical Explorers case-based curriculum to improve student attitudes of the life sciences. The target population for this study was secondary students enrolled in advanced life science programs. The resulting sample (n = 71) consisted of 36 students in the case-based experimental group and 35 students in the control group. Furthermore, this study employed an experimental, pretest-posttest control group research design. The treatment consisted of two instructional strategies: case-based learning and teacher-guided learning. Analysis of covariance indicated no treatment effect on critical thinking ability or Motivation and Self-regulation of Learning. However, the Medical Explorers case-based curriculum did show a treatment effect on student attitudes toward the life sciences. These results seem to indicate that case-based curriculum has a positive impact on students’ perspectives and attitudes about the study of life science as well as their interest in life science based careers. Such outcomes are also a good indicator that students enjoy and perceive the value to use of case studies in science, and because they see value in the work that they do they open up their minds to true learning and integration. Of additional interest was the observation that on average eleventh graders showed consistently stronger gains in critical thinking, motivation and self-regulation of learning strategies, and attitudes toward the life sciences as compared to twelfth grade students. In fact, twelfth grade students showed a pre to post loss on the Watson-Glaser and the MSLQ scores while eleventh grade students showed positive gains on each of these instruments. This decline in twelfth grade performance is an endemic indicator of underlying problems that exists in this transitional year of education and supports the need to strengthen the transitional connections between high schools and institutions of higher learning. / Department of Biology

In the present study, the role of locus of control and critical thinking in handling dissatisfactions in the romantic relationships of university students was examined. Five hundred and eighty university students (373 females, 207 males) from different faculties of five universities located in Ankara voluntarily participated in the study. Convenient sampling procedure was used in all phases of the study. A pilot study was conducted to adapt My Responses to Relationship Problems Scale (MRRPS) into Turkish. Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) and Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) were utilized to assess factorial and dimensional structure of MRRPS. Results revealed MRRPS to be psychometrically satisfactory. In the main study, four separate, moderated regression analyses were conducted to assess the predictive role of locus of control, critical thinking, and their interaction on exit, voice, loyalty and neglect responses. Results revealed that locus of control significantly predicted exit, voice and neglect responses. Participants with external locus of control had significantly higher exit and neglect scores whereas participants with internal locus of control had significantly higher voice scores. In addition, critical thinking significantly predicted exit and voice scores. Participants with lower levels of critical thinking disposition had higher exit scores whereas participants with higher levels of critical thinking had significantly higher voice scores. Findings of the present study were discussed in the framework of locus of control, critical thinking and close relationships.

In a challenging and constantly changing world, students are required to develop advanced thinking skills such as critical systematic thinking, decision making and problem solving. This challenge requires developing critical thinking abilities which are essential in unfamiliar situations. A central component in current reforms in mathematics and science studies worldwide is the transition from the traditional dominant instruction which focuses on algorithmic cognitive skills towards higher order cognitive skills. The transition includes, a component of scientific inquiry, learning science from the student's personal, environmental and social contexts and the integration of critical thinking. The planning and implementation of learning strategies that encourage first order thinking among students is not a simple task. In an attempt to put the importance of this transition in mathematical education to a test, we propose a new method for mathematical instruction based on the infusion approach put forward by Swartz in 1992. In fact, the model is derived from two additional theories., that of Ennis (1989) and of Libermann and Tversky (2001). Union of the two latter is suggested by the infusion theory. The model consists of a learning unit (30h hours) that focuses primarily on statistics every day life situations, and implemented in an interactive and supportive environment. It was applied to mathematically gifted youth of the Kidumatica project at Ben Gurion University. Among the instructed subjects were bidimensional charts, Bayes law and conditional probability; Critical thinking skills such as raising questions, seeking for alternatives and doubting were evaluated. We used Cornell tests (Ennis 1985) to confirm that our students developed critical thinking skills.