A case study of critical thinking behavior in an online collaborative inquiry

This paper reports on a case study to investigate whether the scores obtained from various critical thinking instruments were correlated to the extent to which student exhibited critical thinking behavior in authentic problem-solving situations. On the one hand, students' critical thinking skills and dispositions were examined using three instruments. On the other hand, student participants were introduced to use an online discussion environment to conduct collaborative inquiry. The students' online discourse reflects their engagement in authentic problem-solving practices as they tackled the learning tasks assigned by the teacher. Content analysis was performed to identify instances of critical thinking behavior in the online discourse using Perkins and Murphy's framework. The results suggest that students' context-free critical thinking skills and dispositions have been improved after the collaborative inquiry. And the context-specific critical thinking test is useful as a predictor of students' critical thinking behavior exhibited in authentic contexts.