Investigation of EFL College Learners’ Critical Thinking and Creativity in Writing on Online Discussion Board

• Main Authors: Jung-Jung Liu, 劉蓉蓉
• Other Authors: Ai-Ling Wang
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2014
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/49763369363493349223

碩士 === 淡江大學 === 英文學系碩士班 === 102 === This study is aimed to investigate college student’s critical thinking and creativity and the relation between academic background, gender, cultural background, learning attitude and information process in terms of critical thinking and creativity. The research is a mix of qualitative and quantitative research methods with grounded-theory research methods for investigating patterns of postings and the relation between participants’ characteristics and written discourse. One hundred and forty-six college students who consist of 57 participants in International Business, 46 participants in Banking and Finance and 43 participants in Mass Communication. The researcher supplemented three discussion sessions in Moodle discussion board and the topics are related to life reflection, an issue related to student life and an issue related to their near future. During the discussion session, the researcher and other TESOL members evaluated the participants’ learning attitude according to the Habits and Attitudes to learning Rubric. After the three sessions of discussion, the researcher and other TESOL member analyzed the participants’ postings and categorized them based on the rubric of critical thinking and creativity. The results show that students’ academic background, gender, cultural background and learning attitude differentiate their information process in terms of critical thinking and creativity in the three sessions of discussion. In other words, the findings of the research show that students with different majors, different genders, different cultural background and different levels of learning attitude revealed different level of critical thinking and creativity in detail aspects on the rubric. The results were in consistency with previous studies in the field. In light of the result and discussion of the research, it was implied that teachers should take students’ academic background, cultural background and learning attitude into account when they are going to apply discussion sessions in online discussion broad. In order to cultivate students’ critical thinking and creativity more efficiently, teachers should adapt teaching materials and methods according to students with different characteristics.