Higher Order Thinking tasks in fostering critical thinking through writing

Abstract

This study explored how Higher Order Thinking (HOT) tasks can be used to foster critical thinking skills in English academic writing classes in ESOL contexts such as Malaysia. The study adopted a qualitative multiple case study approach, where the researcher used the purposive sampling technique to choose a cohort of ten students from the pre-university writing course under the Language Centre of a Malaysian tertiary institution. The participants were invited to join a 5-day “Critical Thinking Through Writing” workshop series where in the first hour, they were shown a visual prompt and asked to complete various higher order thinking tasks on each day’s workshop session. In the second hour of the sessions, they were requested to write argumentative essays on a given topic and with the ideas they had generated while completing the HOT tasks. The HOT tasks were designed with a combination of HOT questions that followed Bloom`s Revised Taxonomy (2001) and thinking activities advocated by John C. Bean (2011) and Edward de Bono (2010). The findings of the study were triangulated with data collected from the video recordings, students’ essays and their post-workshop semi-structured interviews. It was revealed that while completing the HOT tasks, the participants were either “active”, “moderately active”, or “silent” in being engaged in the task. All the participants had generated numerous ideas throughout the HOT task sessions, which some of them transferred to the essays completely while some others transferred partially. Some of the students did not utilise the ideas and included new ideas they could come up with while writing the essays. When asked about the challenges of completing the HOT tasks and thinking critically through writing, most of the ESOL students mentioned that the term critical thinking and academic writing were new to them. Their schooling backgrounds did not include tasks or assessments that required them to think critically about any topic. Moreover, they pointed out that the prescriptive essay structures that they came across in the Language Centre of the university had limited their expression of ideas because they were used to write essays within a limited number of body paragraphs. The researcher noticed that being unfamiliar with a given topic was another reason that hindered students’ comprehension of the subject and critical writing ability. Nevertheless, the participants found the HOT tasks very useful for generating and organising ideas for their essays. Moreover, they felt that the HOT tasks encouraged them to think objectively about a given topic. The current study is significant in filling the gap of knowledge regarding using HOT tasks for fostering critical thinking in academic writing classes in non-native ESOL contexts. It also highlights the problems ESOL students face while transferring their ideas from HOT tasks to their essays, which is less explored in the existing scholarly literature.