Making Critical Thinking Skills Training Explicit, Engaging, and Effective through Live Debates on Current Political Issues: A Pilot Pedagogical Experiment

Abstract

We piloted a pedagogical experiment to find out whether students can benefit from explicit demonstrations on critical thinking skills through live debates between two instructors on current political issues that are relevant to, but not necessarily a specific part of, the curriculum. The empirical results show that through a series of interventions in the form of explicit demonstrations and debriefs on critical thinking skills over these issue-based live debates, the students' academic performance can significantly improve over a relatively short period of time. This result, we suggest, demonstrates that training the students' critical skills through explicit, engaging pedagogy is not only economical in practical and pragmatic terms, but also proven to have at least significant immediate, short-term effects in a setting where there is a high proportion of first generation undergraduate students of varying abilities and backgrounds.