Conceptualisations of critical thinking in academic writing at a master’s level
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Date
28/11/2019Author
Drybrough, Andrew Gordon
Metadata
Abstract
Critical thinking is often considered to involve a set of skills required by
graduates of higher educational institutions in the UK. However, the
conceptualisation of critical thinking by university tutors varies across disciplines and
is not always particularly clear. In a UK higher educational context where
proportionally increasing numbers of postgraduate students are international, often
from educational traditions where critical thinking is less of a priority, it is important
to compare international student understanding of critical thinking with that of
postgraduate course tutors.
This thesis aimed to compare the conceptualisations of critical thinking skills
by postgraduate students and tutors, and gauge how these skills are connected to
academic writing at a UK Russell Group university. To do this, a mixed methods
approach was adopted involving three main stages: a student questionnaire, focus
groups and interviews with students, and interviews with tutors. The questionnaire
asked 235 students to rate the importance of different statements describing
features of academic writing based on aspects of written argumentation and
cognitive skills. Results show that clear argumentation was ranked highly, alongside
the skills of comparing and evaluating content.
Analysis of the findings from the focus groups and interviews with students
and tutors resulted in three main themes: that critical reading was an essential
component of critical writing; that clear argumentation and voice are important
features of critical academic writing, and that there was what appeared to be a
phase in the process of academic writing which I have labelled as a
‘(re)construction’ phase. For students, this involved the importance of comparing
and evaluating different viewpoints and perspectives, while for tutors it involved the
need for academic writers to make connections between theory, evidence and
practice.
A final question looked at what were perceived to be the most effective
approaches to teaching and learning critical thinking at a postgraduate master’s
level. Both students and tutors agreed that an ‘infusion’ approach to teaching critical
thinking could be most effective. This involves the teaching of critical thinking skills
explicitly within specific disciplines. Although a separate generic course on critical
thinking was less popular, the role of current research methods courses and (to a
limited extent) study skills courses were key elements involved in the second most
popular response, which involved a mixture of different approaches.
Pedagogical implications of these findings include the need to focus on the
role of tutors in teaching explicitly what it means to be critical within a discipline, and
the role that research methods courses can have in reinforcing more generic
aspects of critical thinking.