Cultivating critical thinking ability is important educational goal.
Particularly, cultivating critical thinking disposition is a essential element of critical thinking education. Debate is known as effective program for cultivating critical thinking. However, only about 6 students can participate in one debate at the same time, and one debate needs one teacher as a judge. Japanese class room usually has 40 students. Therefore if all students of a Japanese class room participate in debate, many teachers will be needed. It is not practicable because number of teachers is limited. Purpose of this study is to propose a debate learning program which is practicable in a class room of general Japanese high school for cultivating critical thinking disposition.
In this study, the authors propose a learning program which cultivates critical thinking disposition thorough experience of using knowledge and skill of critical thinking. Proposed program consists of four phases. In first phase, students read a book for beginners for critical thinking to achieve knowledge of critical thinking. In second phase, students individually do the exercises of critical thinking. In third phase, each student makes a presentation of their critical thinking about their own theme. In fourth phase, students participate in debate using a debate leaning system. The debate learning system provides Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) environment for debate via The Internet. This system enables many groups of students to participate in debate at the same time without many teachers as judge.
Proposed program was practiced in a Japanese high school in first semester of 2009. 438 Japanese high school students of 11 classes were participated in the practice. To evaluate proposed program, pre-presentation test, pre-debate test and post-debate test were conducted using a Japanese critical thinking disposition scale (Hirooka et al. 2000). Hirooka et al.(2000) extract three factors of critical thinking disposition, ¡Èobjectivity¡É, ¡Ègood-faith¡É, ¡Èinquiring mind¡É.
One -way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to analyze results of the practice. ANOVA shows that factor points of ¡Èobjectivity¡É, ¡Ègood-faith¡É and ¡Èinquiring mind¡É significantly rose(p ¡ã 0.01). Nevertheless, Scheffe\¡Çs paired comparison shows that rising of ¡Èinquiring mind¡É between pre-presentation and pre-debate, and between pre-debate and post-debate were not significant(p ¡ä 0.05), even if rising of factor points of ¡Èobjectivity¡É, ¡Ègood-faith¡É were significant(p ¡ã 0.05).
The results suggest that proposed program can cultivate critical thinking disposition. However, rising of ¡Èinquiry mind¡É was comparatively lower than these of other factors. This is because debate doesn¡Çt need creativity and curiosity which are related to ¡Èinquiry mind¡É by supposition. On the other hand, debate needs logical and objective persuasion, and faithfully listening to others proposition, these characteristics may cultivate ¡Èobjectivity¡É and ¡Ègood-faith¡É.
In this study, a learning program using a debate system for cultivating critical thinking disposition was proposed and practiced in Japanese high school. To conclude, cultivating critical thinking effect of proposed program was confirmed even if that of ¡Èinquiring mind¡É is comparatively low. In the future, the authors want to propose new learning program which can raise whole critical thinking disposition all together including ¡Èinquiring mind¡É.