Options
Ascertaining the critical thinking and formal reasoning skills of students’
Citation
Lim, T. K. (1996, September). Ascertaining the critical thinking and formal reasoning skills of students’. Paper presented at the Growing Mind Conference, Geneva, Switzerland.
Author
Lim, Tock Keng
Abstract
With the critical thinking movement gaining momentum in all levels of education in the US and other countries, many thinking programmes have been developed. A thinking programme that emphasizes on process, teaching students how to think, rather than what to think, is the Philosophy for Children (P4C) programme, currently carried out in Singapore. A child , according to Matthew Lipman (1991) , the founder of the P4C programme, could reason deductively and logically using concrete objects. In his specially written stories for children, Lipman translated the abstract formulations to reasoning in a concrete way that children could understand . To determine whether primary and secondary pupils in Singapore can reason and do philosophy , a study was
set up in 1992 to ascertain their reasoning skills. Two instruments were used: the New Jersey Test of Reasoning (NJTR) specifically developed in the early 1980s to evaluate the P4C programme (Shipman, 1983) and the Test of Formal Reasoning (ATFR) written by Arlin (1982 , 1984) to measure the stage of intellectual and cognitive level of the student: concrete, high concrete, transitional , low formal and high formal. This paper reports the findings of the study concerning the relationships between critical thinking as measured by the NJTR and concrete and formal reasoning as measured by the ATFR.
Date Issued
September 1996
Description
This paper was presented at the Growing Mind Conference, held in Geneva, Switzerland from 14 - 18 Sep 1996