Secondary school teachers' perspectives of teaching critical thinking in social studies classes in the Republic of China

Teaching critical thinking has been emphasized in elementary and secondary schools for over 40 years in the United States. In contrast, it has not received much attention in Taiwanese education (Republic of China), until the last few years. This study examined secondary teachers' perspectives of teaching critical thinking in Taiwan. Eleven secondary-school social studies teachers were interviewed. All the interviews were audio taped. Data was later translated into English and analyzed qualitatively. Chinese was the primary language used during the processes of data collection. Whenever necessary, English was added for explanation.;Participants were asked their definition of critical thinking, whether they taught critical thinking or not, how they taught critical thinking skills, what difficulties they encountered when taught critical thinking, their views of current Taiwanese students' ability of critical thinking, and whether the Ministry of Education guidelines and Textbook Teacher's manuals provided enough information and assist for practical teaching of critical thinking.;Classroom observations were conducted and video taped. Notes were taken from the participating observation. Two trained researchers were invited to watch the video tapes and checked the translation. While watching the video tapes, three researchers worked on a sheet for identifying the teacher's teaching methods and rating to what extent the methods promoted students' critical thinking. All the data including audio and video tapes and written publications were sorted, grouped, and analyzed for identifying and seeking out patterns.;The design of the study also included material collection. The materials were books and journals mentioned by the teacher participants, the Ministry of Education guidelines (Senior High School Curriculum Criteria and Junior High School Curriculum Criteria), all students textbooks, Textbook Teacher's Manuals (Teacher's Brochure), and Chinese publications regarding teaching theories, strategies, methods, and materials of Social Studies.;The collected data were translated into English and analyzed qualitatively by the researcher. Two trained researchers with language proficiency in both Chinese and English were invited to check the translation for avoiding translation errors or semantic misunderstanding.;The result indicated that the social studies teachers were not familiar with critical thinking. Their definitions of critical thinking were considerably diverse, seven out of eleven teachers said that they did teach critical thinking skills. However, teachers in the study confirmed the finding of a previous study (Chiodo & Tsai, 1995) that students did not acquire critical thinking skills from Taiwanese schooling. Difficulties of teaching critical thinking related to students were mostly addressed. A considerable proportion of participants indicated that Taiwanese students had too much school work and with the added academic pressure for students to be successful in school they felt critical thinking teaching would be boring or not important, because it didn't increase student test score. Consequently, no response or reaction from students was the main difficulty in teaching critical thinking mentioned by teachers. The Ministry of education guidelines did not require teachers to teach critical thinking, neither did the Textbook Teacher's Manuals provide sufficient teaching strategies.