Contribution
Description: Critical thinking skills are essential for students at all levels. They are essential for gathering, processing, and applying information and knowledge. The ability to reason, solve problems, make decisions and think creatively is essential for students to succeed in their lives. The teaching of thinking skills is a potentially valuable area of educational research and development (Adams and Hamm, 1994; Fisher, 1995; Fisher, 2004; Walker, 2003 and DfES, 2005). Fisher (1995) states that part of the need to teach thinking skills comes from a growing awareness that there are great changes and challenges currently facing the modern world. He also indicates that skills that were appropriate 20 years ago are no longer adequate for preparing students for the world outside the classroom. The idea behind this emphasis on such skills is that, whatever the subject or knowledge that students are studying, they are going to use their thinking skills to understand and learn. So, if teachers can develop and improve these skills, then student performance in understanding the perceived knowledge should be developed and improved. The purpose of this study is to explore the perceptions and experiences of Islamic teachers regarding the promotion of critical thinking skills in intermediate school students, in Abha city in Saudi Arabia. Perception is defined as a key psychological process whereby a person selects and organises environmental information into a concept of reality. Through an assessment of teachers' perceptions, this study attempted to identify those factors which influence the development of critical thinkers
Methodology: A qualitative methodology, informed by grounded theory, was used. Ten Islamic intermediate school teachers, in Abha city in Saudi Arabia, were recruited. In-depth semi-structured interviews were used to collect data. The interviews were audiotaped, transcribed and subjected to thematic analysis.
Conclusions: Participants reported that participation in developing students' thinking contributed a number of benefits. However, they also reported a number of difficulties that restricted this development. These centred mostly upon the pressure of the curriculum, poor behaviour, lack of resources, lack of time and the need for information and professional training. The main results of this study indicate that, although the teachers' definitions and descriptions of critical thinking skills assumed a focus on general and basic thinking skills, such as identifying reasons, judging other points of views and making decisions, they completely agreed that teaching students 'how to think critically' plays an important part in developing students' abilities to reason, compare, classify, order, estimate, explain, interpolate, give evidence, set arguments, use analogies, judge relevance, and draw and evaluate conclusion. They also indicated that developing thinking activities within the student textbooks will develop their thinking and enable them to participate in discussions outside the scope of the school.
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