The Pedagogical Impact on Students' Development of Critical Thinking: Experience from Hong Kong Secondary Schools

Abstract

From a pedagogical perspective, group work as a form of classroom organisation is relatively new to Hong Kong, and has played a very minor role in education policy over the past two decades. On the one hand, important blueprints for education reform contain few mentions of group work. On the other hand, even when group work has been suggested in the local school curriculum, most teachers have perceived it merely as ‘group basis’ teaching, where classes are still in large part teacher-centred. The result is that group work has made little pedagogical difference to the traditional paradigm of whole-class instruction in classroom practice. This paper presents the results of a year-long study that evaluated the effects of different types of pedagogy on the cultivation of students’ critical-thinking abilities. The study addresses two main questions: 1) Is group work more effective than whole-class instruction in cultivating students’ critical-thinking in Liberal Studies lessons? and 2) Can teacher participation enhance students’ critical-thinking abilities and better facilitate their learning in small-group discussions? Building upon the twin theoretical pillars of Piaget (1928) and Vygotsky (1978), the research employed an experimental design to investigate the effects of different types of pedagogy on students’ learning of critical thinking in a teaching intervention. The intervention was contextualised in ten Liberal Studies lessons in two secondary schools in Hong Kong. Its aim was to infuse the Liberal Studies curriculum with the teaching of critical thinking through such problem-solving activities as modelling tasks, group debates, presentations and reflection. One hundred and forty Secondary 4 students (16-18 years of age) from two randomly chosen Hong Kong secondary schools participated in the research. The aim of the study was to assess whether the incorporation of group work in the teaching intervention, which developed on the basis of an established critical-thinking model, could facilitate improvement in students’ argumentative skills. Analysis revealed that group work, in conjunction with instruction in argumentation, has positive effects on the development of critical and analytical thinking. In addition, the students who received teacher guidance showed better interpersonal skills and engaged more interactively in joint learning activities. From a pedagogical standpoint, the Liberal Studies discipline provides insights for schools into how students experience group work instruction relative to transmission-oriented teacher-centred instruction, thus allowing them to better support teachers in designing educational contexts that minimise rote-learning and maximise learning motivation in the classroom.