The effect of critical thinking-infused paragraph writing instruction on university first-year students’ intellectual traits

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of critical thinking-infused paragraph writing instruction on enhancing university first-year L2 students’ intellectual traits. The study involved two randomly selected first-year Social Science stream classes. The researchers employed the embedded design in the study because they mainly used quantitative data augmented by qualitative data. The researchers analyzed the questionnaire data and the interview data using the one-way between groups ANCOVA and thematic analysis method respectively. The finding of the questionnaire data analysis indicated that participants in the treatment group were better in their intellectual traits scores. The result of the interview data analysis also revealed that participants in the treatment group had a better interest in using elements of thought and intellectual traits after the intervention. Hence, integrating critical thinking instruction into APW lessons needs to be considered among all stakeholders to enhance university first-year EFL students’ intellectual traits. Keywords: Argumentative paragraph; critical thinking; instruction; intellectual traits; university first-year students.

Students’ Critical Thinking on Reading Comprehension Based on Contextual Reading Material: An Experimental Study

“…Critical thinking is one of the important skills expected to be obtained through reading comprehension learning. Modern educators and policymakers should place high importance on the development of critical thinking skills (Abrami et al, 2015;Bekele et al, 2022) On the other hand, this skill can be trained through reading. The reading comprehension sessions undertaken by students always involve critical thinking, where students need it to analysis and infer the text being studied.…”