Critical thinking skills in the Greek lyceum: Their promotion within the first class’s informatics textbook

Abstract

To solve problems, specific skills are needed. Critical thinking can help develop such skills. It can contribute to improving problem-solving skills, developing communication skills and cultivating decision making skills. Critical thinking is considered to be a key pedagogical goal in education. Education of informatics and critical thinking have a strong relationship since students cannot develop skills related to Informatics if they cannot think critically. Therefore, within the informatics textbooks the cultivation of critical thinking skills should be promoted. The present paper aims to determine to what extent the cultivation of critical thinking skills is promoted in the Informatics textbook of the first class of the Greek lyceum. This textbook contains thematic units referring to hardware-software and applications, programming environments-applications development and communication collaboration and security within Internet. The method that was used is the quantitative content analysis. The present research revealed that within the examined textbook cultivating critical thinking skills is promoted insufficiently, since in the whole text, the cultivation of critical thinking skills is promoted in a small percent of the text it covers. In the examined material, the critical thinking skills whose cultivation is promoted are the interpretation skill, the analysis skill, the evaluation skill, the inference skill and the explanation skill. The interpretation skill is represented by the categorization sub-skill and the clarifying meaning sub-skill. The analysis skill is represented by the examining ideas sub-skill. The evaluation skill is represented by the assessing claims sub-skill. The inference skill is represented by the querying evidence sub-skill, the conjecturing alternatives sub-skill and the drawing conclusions sub-skill. The explanation skill is represented by the stating results sub-skill and the presenting arguments sub-skill. Moreover, it was found that within the examined text, the cultivation of the self-regulation skill is not promoted. The only parts of the examined text in which the cultivation of critical thinking skills is promoted in the largest percentage of the text they cover are the teaching objectives and in the activities.