Developing and Implementing Critical Thinking Skills Package on Student Teachers of “Vadodara City”.

Abstract

The concept of critical thinking has been evolving from past 2500 years.Socrates envisioned a world where people continually work towards self-improvement and justice, consistently questioning their own ideas and motives. Critical thinking has been emphasized upon by various educational documents, however, its implementation is unknown. This paper attempts to project the findings as a result of development and implementation of critical thinking skills package. This study is a pre-post single group experimental design. A critical thinking package was developed as a part of the study and implemented on the sample of the 49 student teachers of B.Ed programme of Vadodara City. The group received approximately 60 minutes of explicit instruction distributed over the semester for enhancing critical thinking. Student teacher stook pre-test and post-test to measure the effectiveness of the instructional model: Statistical test(t-test)indicated significant difference on the pre-post test results. Results revealed that the developed critical thinking skills package enhance the critical thinking skills among the student teachers. The developed critical thinking skills package incorporating thinking tools and strategies was effective in enhancing critical thinking skills of 88% of the sampled teachers. Sampled teachers improved upon clarity of thought, relevancy, evidence based thinking and informed decision making through the package developed. 82% sampled teachers opined that the package improved their ability to think critically.