The Critical-Thinking Effectiveness of College Students in Taiwan - Examining Students of Human Resource Development Departments

Yong-Shun Lin, Chih-Yang Chao, Yu-Lin Cheng

Abstract: In recent years, the influence and educational environments in Asian countries have attracted attention around the world. However, students from Eastern and Western countries differ in their level of active class participation. Higher education institutions hope to establish a learning environment that promotes high-level thinking to assist students entering the workplace after graduation. Therefore, we examined college students of human resource development departments to investigate their critical thinking performance. We adopted a one-group pretest-posttest experiment design and a teaching approach that involved questioning, brainstorming, and cooperative learning methods. The results of this study indicate that these teaching strategies can effectively enhance students critical-thinking skills. On the attitude, the abilities to identify, analyze, and consider problems improved significantly.

Keywords: critical, thinking, college students, Asian, experiment design