Critical Thinking Skills of Third Grade Secondary School Students as a Component of Their Functional Literacy

Abstract

The modern education perspective views functional literacy, along with critical thinking as its component, as an essential academic skill without which an individual's desired academic, personal, and professional success cannot be attained. The aim of this paper is to present part of the results obtained through investigating the cognitive reasoning skills of third grade secondary school students (N=703) in Novi Sad, Serbia, through investigating their functional literacy in the Serbian language. Those students are about either to enter the job market or pursue their further education and will need both functional literacy and critical thinking skills to a large extent. A questionnaire comprised of 20 questions was constructed to assess the students’ prose and document literacy. The gathered data were analyzed using SPSS 15 and the findings indicate that the level of the respondents’ functional literacy is at a disquieting level and that all of them, irrespective of the type of school they attend, can perform lower-order cognitive processes much more successfully than higher-order ones.