Peer interaction and the learning of critical thinking skills in further education students

A teaching programme is reported in which critical thinking skills (in the sense of reasoned justification of arguments; see Kuhn, 1991, 1993) were ta ught. The principal aims of the study were to develop, implement and evalua te a programme for teaching evidence-based justification to vocational educ ation students in Further Education colleges. Teaching was via modelling an d peer-based critiquing exercises in the context of the students' project w ork. Eighty-four Further Education college students underwent a 10-session teaching intervention which dovetailed with their Additional Assessment int egrative project work. Students took part in peer-based exercises in which they learned to critique imaginary examples of project outlines and plans, followed by similar peer-based critiquing of each others' proposed projects . Analysis of the students' dialogues with each other indicated that they h ad learned the importance of justifying arguments, and content analysis of their written work indicated that they engaged in justification of their ar guments to a significantly greater degree than control groups. Several key variables in the dialogues correlated positively with justification in the written work, suggesting that the dialogue had impacted on the written work . However, justification tended to be of a weak kind (using anecdotes or ex perience-based generalisations), and strong (i.e. formal research-based) ev idence remained relatively infrequent and sometimes inappropriately used. A psychometric test of general critical thinking skills showed no evidence o f transfer of learning.