Doctor in Education (Ed.D.)

Critical thinking is recognised as an essential skill for students to master in the 21st century. Nevertheless, recent studies report a deficit in this skill in a large majority of graduates. Schools, therefore, shoulder a responsibility to develop critical thinking in students. One way that has found success in facilitating critical thinking in students is asynchronous online discussions; however, the research does not reflect the impact of this medium specifically in the context of Economics education. The current study aims to investigate whether incorporating asynchronous online discussions in an economics classroom is effective at fostering critical thinking in secondary school students. A single case study approach involving the collection and analysis of both quantitative and qualitative data was adopted in current study. The participants (31 Grade 11 students) studied economics at an all-girl high school located in the northern part of Malaysia. Their critical thinking outcomes were evaluated using three different approaches of measurement. A Malay version of the Cornell Critical Thinking Test was used to determine any change in the students’ core critical thinking skills that resulted from participating in the asynchronous online discussions. A performance task was used to measure students’ abilities to apply critical thinking strategies in answering questions in an Economics test. Finally, the Newman, Webb, and Cochrane (1995) model was adopted to assess the quality or depth of students’ critical thinking demonstrated in the asynchronous online discussions. The findings provide evidence of improvement in the students’ critical thinking across the discussions. However, a closer examination revealed that the improvement in the students’ thinking levels was not representative of all participants’ ability to think consistently at a high level. This is because majority of the participants were not able to provide substantive responses during their discussions. The findings suggested that the participation procedure that required students to discuss using the Expressing, Asking, Summarising and Yielding (EASY) framework had a significant effect in inducing responses that reflect their higher levels of thinking during the asynchronous online discussions. It was found, however, that the number of discussion topics (four) could have been a limiting factor, and that the impact of the intervention could have been greater if the participants focused on one topic instead. That way, the discussion period for the topic can be extended, allowing the students discuss the issue at a greater depth.