Abstract
It has been widely recognized that critical thinking is an essential competency that can play a significant role in shaping the way the students learn and think in the new information age. In response to this need, a thinking skill course called "Developing Thinking Skills" has been recently issued by the university authority to all students at Princess Noura University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. It aims at developing various types of thinking skills and processes through direct and explicit teaching of such skills. However, the critical thinking skills specified in this course are not effectively emphasized and their teaching strategies are not appropriate to develop such skills. This paper presents an empirical study which investigated the effect of a suggested critical thinking program, with specific teaching methods and strategies, on developing the critical thinking skills of second year college students at the English department in the Faculty of Arts. For the purpose of the study, the program was tried out on a sample of eighty undergraduate female students during the thinking skills course to examine its efficacy in developing their critical thinking skills. The 5-week intervention aimed at enhancing the students' critical thinking skills through explicit teaching of five critical thinking skills: comparing and contrasting, determining parts-whole relationships, determining the reliability of sources, causal explanation and prediction. Instruction in the critical thinking skills was carried out by the researcher and it includes: explicitly introducing the thinking skill and its significance, application of the process by guiding students in the thinking activity through questions and graphic organizers, and then guiding students to transfer the thinking process to other daily life contexts. Several instructional strategies were used in the program including the use of thinking strategy maps, questioning techniques, graphic organizers, reflective metacognitive prompts, and internet technology. The study used a pre-test post-test design and the effectiveness of the program was measured by a critical thinking assessment instrument developed by the National Centre for Teaching Thinking (NCTT). Pre-test and post-test data were collected on the way the critical thinking skills were employed on challenging tasks. The data revealed significant improvements in the students' critical thinking skills.