Can We Teach Critical Thinking in Online Classrooms?

For any educational program to be successful nowadays, it has to include students’ training and practicing critical thinking. When this training happens in the online modality, it is undoubtedly highly magnified. However, it is essential to understand the fullest extension of critical thinking skills, how teachers instruct this skill, and the benefits that students receive once they develop well-founded judgment and reasoning.

 

The etymological origin of critical thinking includes words like thinking, deciding, and separating. Critical thinking means to reach a decision and reasoning after a thoughtful analysis and evaluation of facts, numbers, and circumstances to support a study. More than action, critical thinking is a behavior acquired through practice. In online education, students have access to much information, but this is not always reliable. Instructors must instruct students to discriminate information, analyze sources, evaluate the validity of the selected data. In online education, students work in teams from different cultures and countries. Team members will learn to have tolerance, justice, and respect for all the members for the well-being of the team and project. These skills are part of critical thinking. Learning online includes the construction of new knowledge over experience and prior knowledge. For these to happen, team members will exchange ideas, modify some concepts, and change others. To make these decisions, all participants will learn to be flexibles and fair to reach a common goal. Students must stay focused and concentrated during the work in the online platforms to fulfill the team’s purpose. Critical thinking will keep them after the objectives in the short or long term; then, it has a purpose. The research for better results, the best work possible, a maximum quality, satisfaction from results, a sense of belonging and pride are the result of critical thinking that does not settle for less, wrong information, or a mediocre investigation.

Teachers must not instruct critical thinking as an isolated subject but transversally integrate it in all the topics from the curricula. Teachers must not teach critical thinking without a context. On the contrary, the setting allows to reasoning to happen while learning. Since critical thinking is a soft skill, it works for any field of action. It applicable in any process and an ability that complements students’ formation. In the virtual environment, the practice of critical thinking includes collaborative work through the instruction of ethics, values, and higher-order thinking skills. Discussion forums are frequent in online platforms because they provide a space where students can debate, exchange knowledge and concepts based on their investigation. Critical thinking will direct communication to be respectful, just, and useful. Thanks to online interaction, students will learn to discriminate information that is not relevant or validate its integrity, contrasting it with other sources to practice critical thinking. Moreover, students must put ethics into practice in virtual classrooms, as in any other environment. They must learn to give credit to authors and produce a clean investigation through reasoning, judgment, and discipline, which come from critical thinking. Students will then become digital citizens.

 

Some of the benefits of practicing critical thinking for students in online classrooms are learning to analyze topics. They will learn to question the formality of the source, make founded decisions, validate knowledge and beliefs objectively, and defend points of view with solid arguments. Online education can broaden the development of critical thinking, granting students an opportunity to work with original material and international cases to find rationalized solutions. These sources will expose students to a large variety of situations and thoughts in the virtual world. Here, communication will become effective by using appropriate words and concepts to present their findings. They will have the chance to collect evidence and provide solutions to the problems studied.

 

In conclusion, instructing critical thinking in online learning is not only possible but also a valuable methodology that prepares students for their academic, professional, and personal life. Thus, they must understand the concept, know its field of action, and the endless number of benefits that it brings to XXI century students.

 

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