How to Improve Critical Thinking Using Educational Technology
Van Gelder, Tim. (2001) How to Improve Critical Thinking Using Educational Technology. Retrieved from http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/melbourne01/pdf/papers/vangeldert.pdf
The article, How to Improve Critical Thinking Using Educational Technology, displays one university's attempt to use technology to improve critical thinking skills. Tim van Gelder, of The University of Melbourne, Australia, pioneered the Reason!able (now Rationale) software program after recognizing the difficulties schools have teaching critical thinking skills. The Reason!able software tool uses a mapping visual framework to help students represent and evaluate reasoning of various topics. Students who used this software over a semester showed stronger critical thinking skills than peers who did not use Reason!able. The success of this program and promotion of critical thinking skills is attributed to four key factors in its foundation: it is motivating because of its use of technology, it guides students along with prompting, it scaffolds topics, and provides students with feedback by allowing them to compare their answers to a model. Readers of this article can take away the main ideas of the Reason!able software and implement them into their classroom to build critical thinking skills. Looking for something similar to Reason!able (Rationale)? Use Popplet for free to build critical thinking skills in your classroom. |