Research On The Development And Cultivation Of Critical Thinking In Normal University Students

Normal university students are a special group of college students with the identity of "future educators".Attaching importance to the development of critical thinking of normal university students is the need of cultivating innovative talents,and improving the level of critical thinking of normal university students is a problem that needs to be solved.The critical thinking of normal university students includes three elements: critical analysis skills,openness to criticism and application of criticism.This study takes the normal university students of S University as the research object and adopts the Critical Thinking Scale newly compiled by psychological researchers to comprehensively explore the development of the critical thinking of normal university students.The results show that:(1)The critical thinking of normal university students is generally at a medium level,but the development of the three elements is unbalanced.(2)The development of critical thinking of normal university students has nothing to do with age and gender,but is greatly influenced by family environment.(3)The development of critical thinking of normal university students has obvious characteristics of grade and discipline.The critical thinking of freshman and senior normal university students is significantly higher than that of other grades;and the applied critical thinking of science students is significantly higher than that of liberal arts students.(4)The development of critical thinking in normal university students is closely related to their participation in educational activities,which shows that there are significant differences in the development of critical thinking of normal university students in extracurricular academic activities,educational practice activities,student cadre experience and academic performance.The results show that the development of critical thinking of normal university students is greatly influenced by school education.Based on quantitative survey data,combined with semi-structured interview and classroom observation,the research finds that there are problems in the cultivation of critical thinking of normal university students: first,The school does not keep a watchful eye on cultivation of critical thinking of normal university students,which is reflected in the orientation of training objectives of normal major;the poor implementation effect of extracurricular educational activities organized by the school department;and the weak actual promotion of teachers’ innovative teaching activities carried out by the school department.Second,Teachers’ teaching ignores the development of critical thinking of normal university students,which shows that teachers pay more attention to knowledge teaching;ignore the interaction in teaching;and teaching evaluation plays a weak role in promoting the development of thinking.Third,The thinking inertia and the deviation of critical thinking of normal university students reduce the quality of critical thinking training.Combined with the actual teaching situation,this study puts forward suggestions on improving the quality of critical thinking training of normal university students from three aspects: first,schools should play a supporting role to improve the critical thinking of normal university students,including constructing the cultivation goal of valuing the development of critical thinking of normal university students;give play to the promotion role of high-impact educational activities;building a faculty with high levels of critical thinking.Second,teachers should improve the teaching process and create classrooms that highlight the development of thinking,including emphasizing "thinking teaching" and integrating the development goal of critical thinking.Pay attention to the idea of educational communication and construct group cooperative inquiry teaching;implement question-based teaching method to improve the thinking quality of normal university students;improve teaching evaluation methods,promote normal university students to use critical.Third,normal university students should give full play to self-education and strengthen the positive influence of peers,including paying attention to their own thinking characteristics and strengthening self-critical reflection;explore critical thinking standards and learn from ideal critical thinkers.