Critical Thinking Ability and Performance in Argumentative Essays of the Education Major Students

Abstract

The study was carried out to assess the relationship between students' critical thinking abilities and their success in writing an argumentative essay. The descriptive-correlation design was used in this research. The respondents in this survey were a total of 310 Education major students. This is 22.32 percent of the 1387 students enrolled in the Education program. The 50-item questionnaire was based on the Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal from Pearson TalentLens to measure the student's study critical thinking abilities. The following conclusions were drawn: the students lack critical thinking ability; the students have difficulty in constructing argumentative essays; and the less critical the students are, the less performance they have in writing argumentative essays.

Assessing Strategies of Performing Critical Thinking in an Argumentative Essay

“…The features of an argumentative essay are wellresearched, accurate, detailed, and current information to support the thesis statement and consider other points of view; the characteristics of critical thinking skills are creativity, curiosity, open-mindedness, decision-making, inference, analytic reasoning, logical reasoning, objectivity, and introspection. Either an argumentative essay or critical thinking features contribute toward the success of a good essay (Shahriari & Shadloo, 2019;Mokhtar et al, 2020;Ma & Li, 2022a). Therefore, writing an argumentative essay with critical thinking skills helps to make clear and detailed discussion, analysis, and interpretation of a text.…”

Representation of Students’ Critical Thinking in Writing: A Critical Literacy Perspective

“…It is obvious that developing thinking and reasoning skills is necessary for writing effectively (Pramonojati et al, 2019). Critical thinking aids in producing well-informed opinions since it is based on knowledge, reasonable analysis, and reflection (Ma & Li, 2022). To ensure highquality writing, criticality aids in evaluating the arguments and supporting data, constructing a debate, being skeptical, asking questions, spotting trends, searching for bias, spotting organizational problems, and reaching an unbiased conclusion based on the available data (Saha, 2022).…”