BOOSTING "GOOD" THINKING IN VOCATIONAL EDUCATION AND TRAINING.

R. T. Pithers, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia and

Rebecca Soden, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland.

Summary of presentation at the 3rd International Conference
"Researching Vocational Education and Training" July 14-16 1999, Bolton Institute

Address:

Dr. R. Pithers

Faculty of Education

University of Technology, Sydney

P. O. Box 123

Broadway NSW 2007

AUSTRALIA.

Fax: + 61 2 9514 3939

BOOSTING ëGOODí THINKING IN VOCATIONAL EDUCATION AND TRAINING.

R. T. Pithers, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia and

Rebecca Soden, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland.

Abstract

The employers of vocational education and training graduates as well as many national governments are increasingly arguing that it is important for tertiary education to prepare job-ready individuals who are capable of ëgoodí thinking. ëGoodí thinking and ëthinking wellí are commonly used terms closely associated with what is called ëcritical thinkingí in much of the published literature in this area. In this paper, however, evidence is presented which suggests that many vocational education and training graduates may not be good at critical thinking in practice. There is also evidence that some vocational education and training teachers do not appear to be effective in teaching or in helping students to learn ëgoodí thinking skills. Research literature in the area of critical thinking is examined and the methods and conceptions likely to inhibit and enhance this important competency are described and discussed. Ways of boosting vocational studentsí critical thinking skills are outlined.

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A dynamic, changing workplace environment is going to increasingly need vocational education graduates who possess generic, metacognitive skills, knowledge and attitudes which underpin their professional expertise as well as help to provide individual vocational adaptability. Individuals who are flexible, quick to learn and capable of adapting previous knowledge and skills to new situations and contexts. Life-long learners who can continue independently to develop and use ëgoodí thinking skills. Many national governments are demanding that vocational education and training ought to enable graduates to think ësmarterí than before. This is because national development is tied up with vocational education outcomes and because of the onward rush of economic competition with globalisation and its associated technological and social change.

Generic ëgood thinkingí competencies

In the United Kingdom, the Higher Education Quality Council (1996), argues that graduates are expected to learn not only the content and methods of a discipline but also to develop 'generic' abilities which can be deployed flexibly in a wide range of work and life contexts. In the Australian context, the teaching and learning of a range of ëgenericí thinking competencies are seen to be at the core of life-long learning to improve studentsí flexibility and adaptability when they enter the workforce. These competencies are represented for example, by knowledge and skills relating to: collecting, analysing and organising information, planning activities, problem solving and communicating information (Mayer, 1992). In most instances, such competencies parallel those developed in the UK (NCVQ Core Skills) and in the United States of America (Workplace Know-How skills). All of this, however, in practice is dependent on the ability of vocational teachers to teach these generic thinking competencies together with their usual domain specific content.

This paperís purpose is to examine some major practical ideas in the literature concerned with the teaching-learning of ëgood thinkingí or ëcritical thinkingí as it is termed in the literature and which could be implemented in vocational education and training without extra resources. The term ëgood thinkingí is used in the paper not only as defined in the literature but also as a way of summarising some of the major generic abilities being emphasised in recent government papers.

Conceptions of critical thinking

While it is acknowledged by many skakeholders that the contemporary vocational education curriculum should help students to think well and to think for themselves, very little appears to be known about whether vocational teachers use and are able to teach critical thinking. The evaluation of ëgoodí thinking has been sorely neglected worldwide (e.g., Kennedy, Fisher & Ennis, 1991). Nevertheless, ëgood thinkingí or ëthinking smarterí is explored in a developing philosophically and psychologically based literature on helping students to engage in thinking for themselves (e.g., Bonnett, 1995; Hyland & Johnston; 1988).

The term ëcritical thinkingí is used in a body of research literature to describe reasonable, reflective thinking in any subject domain focusing on task, people or belief (Ennis, 1993). It is a definition which attempts to exclude creative thinking. Critical thinking involves abilities as well as certain dispositions or attitudes. Abilities are involved in identifying a problem and its associated assumptions, clarifying and focusing the problem, analysing, understanding and making use of inferences, inductive and deductive logic. In a developmental, self-directed way, they are involved in judging the validity and reliability of the assumptions, in evaluation as well as in applying the sources of data or information available (e.g., Kennedy, et al. 1991; Ramsden, 1992; Tait & Knight, 1996).

Dispositions such as a "spirit of inquiry" are also seen to be important (e.g., Ennis, 1993; Perkins, Jay & Tishman, 1993). Ennis's view of critical thinking, for example, involves broad transferable dispositions such as being "open minded", ìweighing the credibility of evidenceî and ìdrawing unwarranted assumptions cautiouslyî. Kuhn (1991) argues that these abilities and dispositions occur within a global perspective in which thinking is conceptualised as a type of reasoned argument with an explicitly social dimension.

The difficulties

Kember (1997) found that because content in tertiary courses is usually specified far more fully than potentially generalisable abilities, teachers tended to focus more on subject-matter content when teaching rather than on the development of critical thinking. Vocational teachers are offered little help in clarifying what is encompassed in the notion of ëgoodí thinking. Thus they are not clear on what it is they are supposed to be helping students to develop. On-going confusion about these matters sometimes leads to teaching approaches to problem solving which are unlikely to develop more widely transferable generalisable critical thinking abilities and dispositions.

The development of work-related ëgoodí thinking has been emphasised since the late 1980s yet research in the UK tertiary education sector does not show many examples of teaching-learning which are consistent with this aim. Teaching behaviours likely to develop critical thinking were found to be rare in Social Care courses even though this profession values critical inquiry (Anderson, Halliday, Howie & Soden, 1997). Bloomer (1998) reported a similar finding based on his research of a range of programmes leading to General National Vocational Qualifications.

The problem may be quite widespread. For example, a study of critical thinking was recently undertaken involving 256 Scottish and Australian vocational and further education teachers who were all studying education at university (Pithers and Soden, 1999). Critical thinking was measured using a reasonably valid and reliable standardised psychological test with versions available for both countries. Mean critical thinking scores were compared for course entrants with non-degrees and degrees as well as for stage or year of course. Overall, it was found that there were neither significant betweengroup, critical thinking differences for graduate vs non-graduate students nor for stage of the course. In fact, graduate vocational teachers had mean scores not significantly higher than the non-graduates and these were not significantly higher than the normative sample means provided by the test developers for school leavers who had taken examinations only qualifying them for university.

Furthermore, in a paper, which is in preparation, the authors found using a sample of essays that instances of critical thinking were rare and there was a high frequency of assertions without justification, even though the course programme aims included the development of abilities encompassed by the term ëcritical thinkingí.

Are there approaches which appear to inhibit studentsí ability to think well?

Raths, Wasserman, Jonas and Rothstein (1966) and more recently Sternberg (1987), have discussed practices which tend to inhibit or cause the outright failure of the development of students' ëgoodí thinking. Raths et al.ís (1966) research indicated that some students engaged in 'thoughtless' or 'unwise' behaviours as their primary behavioural patterns. They argued that such individual patterns of behaviour can and should be changed, substituting more thoughtful and wise thinking and behaviours for the maladaptive patterns.

Raths et al. went on to discuss the types of teacher behaviour which they argued, inhibited good thinking. For example, any teacher, who simply agrees or disagrees, just demonstrates and explains, cuts off student responses, uses reproof rather than praise, shakes the learner's confidence in the value of new ideas and uses only retrieval or recall types of questions. They examined the sort of student, teachers tend to reward best: it was usually the quiet nonthinker.

On the other hand, those ëgood thinkingí operations to be incorporated into any subject domain, included: comparing, interpreting, observing, summarising, classifying, suggesting hypotheses, taking decisions, creating, criticising and evaluating, designing investigations, identifying assumptions, coding, gathering and organising data or information and applying principles to new situations.

More recently, Sternberg (1987) has argued that in teaching critical thinking there are more ways to fail than to succeed. He pointed out that many teaching programs in this area are doomed in the planning phase, rather than the teaching-leaning interface. He saw eight teacher fallacies as obstructing the teaching and learning of ëgenericí critical thinking. They are: 1) teachers who believed that they had nothing to learn from students; 2) critical thinking is solely the lecturerís job; 3) there is a 'correct program' for the delivery of critical thinking; 4) the choice of a critical thinking program is based on a number of binary choices; 5) what really is important is the 'right' answer; 6) discussion is a means to an end; 7) the notion of masterylearning, which implies (unreasonably) some ceiling on good thinking; 8) the role of a course in critical thinking is to teach critical thinking. There appears to be little doubt that Sternberg's (1987) eight obstructive fallacies about critical thinking are worthy of consideration and action at the curriculum design stage to ensure planned changes that enhance rather than inhibit critical thinking.

How can vocational teachers promote ëgoodí thinking?

Most workers in the field seem to be agreed on the point that to promote critical thinking the students must learn to teach themselves to reflect and refine the strategies; to develop their metacognitive knowledge and skills (e.g., weigh evidence, look for interrelatedness or interrelationships, develop stable hypotheses). The vocational education teacher and trainer needs to facilitate this individual process. Nevertheless, too often it seems to be the practitioner who sets the problem(s), shows the student how to examine it and solve it and then leaves the student to solve similar problems, often with model answers provided as feedback.

Good thinking and ëgoodí content knowledge are closely connected (e.g., Laurillard, 1993; Ramsden, 1992). Some theorists suggest that learning to think with understanding involves learning to use content in successively more sophisticated ways. It would seem that one effective measure vocational teachers could deploy in their teaching is to put more emphasis on particular forms of reasoning within their own subject-matter content and to give explicit examples of how these forms of reasoning can be applied in a wide range of contexts.

Langer (1997) is a researcher who is concerned with teachers presenting content "mindfully". This viewpoint, is that teachers should learn to teach from multiple perspectives and focus on linkages and similarities of content so as to encourage student sensitivity, novelty and awareness of thinking in different contexts. In this respect vocational teachers should look for novel approaches, accept the notion that the 'truth' may be fluid and context dependant and that the learner needs to develop more action, self control over their own learning.

Raths et al. (1966) indicated a range of teaching techniques which brought about changes in studentsí thinking. One was having the students consciously reflect on their core ideas. It involved encouraging the students to reflect on and analyse these ideas. Vocational students, for example, could be assisted to analyse their ideas via the teacher asking for examples, similarities, assumptions, inconsistencies and alternatives or by questioning prior assumptions, also by using classification and by deciding what data or information support an assumption. Another outcome of this work is the idea that the vocational education teacher should challenge current student ideas. This could be attained by facilitating the generation of alternative hypotheses, the interpretation of information or data, specification of criteria or helping students to understand the judgmental processes for applying principles to new situations or for making predictions.

Self-regulation of one's cognitive abilities is likely to be widely generalisable (Broekaerts, 1997). Therefore, a useful idea concerns teachersí modelling ways of thinking involving ëscaffoldingí students' attempts to understand and use concepts. This is about encouraging students to reflect on the strengths and weaknesses of the thinking processes they are using. Through modelling behaviour, vocational teachers could make the various forms of reasoning used within their content more visible and salient to students. ëScaffoldingí students' discussion in tutorials could alert them to opportunities for using these forms of reasoning. It has been concluded from analysing the video data of high school teaching that teachers did not notice most of the opportunities which arose to 'scaffold' students' thinking in the traditional disciplines (Bliss, Askew and McRae, 1996).

Schwartz and Parks (1994) have produced some ideas applicable to vocational education and training for improving the likelihood of the far transfer of ëgoodí thinking. Students, for example, could be asked to read an article making certain claims. Then their task is to suggest ways of investigating the validity of these claims, implementing their suggestions and finally reaching conclusions about the validity of the article.

Ways forward

There would seem to be benefits in overhauling the entire vocational curriculum so that the amount of first year discipline-specific content knowledge could be reduced to allow the students time to engage in activities which are likely to develop their thinking along the lines discussed in this paper. The question of how much discipline knowledge is good for students needs to be examined. Research also suggests that staff development initiatives may need to focus more on teachersí conceptions of learning and teaching if they are to deploy the teaching approaches suggested here. Empirical research indicates quite strong relationships between teachersí conceptions and teaching approaches (Kember 1997). Teachers who just slavishly follow subject matter guidelines in curriculum documents do not seem to teach thinking well. A student-centred, learning oriented, rather than a teacher-centred, content-oriented approach is more consistent with approaches outlined above for developing students' thinking.

Most notions of good thinking are strongly linked to human dialogue. Critical thinking and problem solving in the workplace or in life are not isolated activities and may be influenced by the social communication, context and culture in which it is 'situated'. This means that cultural sensitivity and effective communication skills may be other important characteristics of ëgoodí thinking.

In the UK, Anderson et al. (1997) demonstrated that students' thinking could be significantly improved in the normal curriculum by embedding measures reflecting the main themes reviewed in this paper. The results of the intervention were still observable at the end of the academic year. Vocational education and training teachers need to prepare graduates for a next century in which ígoodí thinking is important, learned and is applied. Boosting ëgoodí thinking may not be an easy process but it can be done and needs to be addressed if vocational education students are to become workplace competent and flexible problem solvers, life-long learners who are to able to achieve the national goals set for them.

References

Anderson, R. Halliday, J. Howe, C. & Soden, R. (1997) Bridging the Academic/Vocational Divide by Integrating Critical Thinking. End of Award Report to ESRC (research grant number R000221801).

Bliss, J. Askew, M. & Macrae, S. (1996) Effective teaching and learning: scaffolding revisited, Oxford Review of Education, 22, pp. 167-186.

Bloomer, M. (1998). They tell you what to do and then they let you get on with it: the illusion of progressivism in GNVQ, Journal of Education and Work, 11, pp.37-62.

Boekaerts, M. (1997) Self-regulated Learning: a new concept embraced by researchers, policy makers, educators, teachers, and students, Learning and Instruction, 7, pp. 161-186.

Bonnett, M. (1995) Teaching thinking and the sanctity of content, Journal of Philosophy of Education, 29 pp. 295-309.

Ennis, R.H. (1993) Critical thinking assessment, Theory into Practice, 32, pp. 179-186.

Higher Education Quality Council, Quality Enhancement Group, (February, 1996) What are Graduates? Clarifying the Attributes of 'Graduateness'. London: HEQC.

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Pithers, R. & Soden, R. (1999) Assessing vocational tutorsí thinking skills, Journal of Vocational Education and Training, 51, No. 1.