The Correlation Of Intelligence,Critical Thinking And Reading Achievements

Critical thinking is one of the most popular academic topics at home and abroad,which probes into students' creative capacity.Since 1960s,researches on critical thinking have become a focal point in western countries with delectable achievements.With the promotion of critical thinking theory in China,more and more relevant researches have been done,but most of them focus on the application of the relevant theories to the cultivation of the ability of creative thinking.As we all know,reading is an important way for the development of human intelligence and certain relationship may exist between critical thinking and intelligence.However,previous researches on critical thinking tend to ignore the influence of intelligence as well as the correlation between reading ability and critical thinking.Thus a problem arises in this situation that what is the relationship between critical thinking and reading ability under the condition of controlling intelligence?Furthermore,for Chinese second language learners,reading ability includes the ability to read in both Chinese and English.Is there an interactive relationship between them?Answering these questions helps deepen our understanding of the mechanism of critical thinking.However,little attention has been attached to such questions so far,especially the correlation of intelligence,critical thinking and reading ability.Therefore,this paper tries to probe into the correlation of critical thinking and reading achievements(including Chinese reading scores and English reading scores)under the condition of controlling the influence of intelligence.Students'critical thinking dispositions,Raven's IQ data of 53 subjects were collected from senior one students of Shishi Shiguang Middle School.The reading performance(the average of reading scores in three English tests and Chinese tests)were also adopted.The statistical data were analyzed with SPSS 13.0,and the result of the experiment suggested:1)Students' critical thinking dispositions were positively correlated both to their Chinese reading scores and English reading scores.2)The subjects' Pearson correlation of critical thinking dispositions and Chinese reading scores was 0.595,which was comparatively higher than that of students' critical thinking dispositions and their English reading scores.3)Students with a higher level of critical thinking dispositions had better performance both in their Chinese and English reading tests than those with a lower level.4)Significant difference in critical thinking dispositions still could be found though subjects' intelligence had been controlled.In a word,high school students' critical thinking were positively correlated to their reading achievements.Namely,students' critical thinking ability can influence their reading performance on one hand,different reading performance reflects different level of students' critical thinking on the other,while controlling general intelligence.In other words,students with better reading capacity possess higher level of critical thinking and those with higher level of critical thinking are more interested in reading and more sensitive to the reading material.