Critical Thinking and Reasoning for Information Systems Students

Thomas, Theda; Davis, Timothy; Kazlauskas, Alanah

doi:10.28945/724

Cited by 2 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…Written comments during the moderation process revealed what had been reported as anecdotal in Thomas, Davis, and Kazlauskas (2004). While the marker was unaware of any differences between the previous studies of the students, one of the comments when the marks were originally submitted was … Have they (referring to the Bachelor of Information Systems students) had you for something else?…”

Section: Figure 6: the Essay Topic Given To Students In Sadmentioning

confidence: 99%

Embedding Critical Thinking in IS Curricula

Thomas

Davis²,

Kazlauskas

2007

JITE:Research

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Executive SummaryIt is important for students to develop critical thinking and other higher-order thinking skills during their tertiary studies. Along with the ability to think critically comes the need to develop students' meta-cognitive skills. These abilities work together to enable students to control, monitor, and regulate their own cognitive processes and improve their ability to comprehend and solve problems.This paper proposes the use of scaffolding as a method of helping students to develop their critical thinking and meta-cognitive skills within the IS curriculum. Scaffolding enables students to undertake tasks that they might not have been able to tackle without the scaffolding. It allows the learners to focus on the aspects of the task that they can manage, while still keeping an understanding of the task as a whole. As the scaffolding is gradually removed, the student should be able to work more independently and apply the new skills effectively.The paper shows how the scaffolding of the process of critical thinking can be used in the early stages of the IS curriculum to enable students to first learn, then gain confidence, in using the techniques that they need to apply independently in the latter stages of the curriculum. Some of the topics covered and where skills were developed included writing essays (in particular essays that include argument), critical and analytical thinking in programming, and the use of problemsolving techniques in systems analysis and design.In the section on critical and analytical thinking in programming, we show how we taught students to think logically and then how this was applied in programming. The task of testing algorithms was scaffolded to enable the students to learn how to evaluate a program and create test data. The paper then shows how the lecturer developed students' meta-cognitive skills by phrasing SQL questions that made the students conscious of their thinking and helped them to link what they were currently doing with their previous knowledge.The paper goes on to show how the conventional problem-solving techniques that are often taught to school children can be used in systems analysis and design. These techniques help the student to consider the whole picture and to understand the relationships between the different parts of the system and how it interacts with the rest of the world.Lastly, the paper describes how the students were taught to write and argue when writing an academic essay. The first assessment task was carefully scaffolded to help the students understand the need to put forward an argument, substantiate that argument and to miniMaterial published as part of this publication, either on-line or in print, is copyrighted by the Informing Science Institute. Permission to make digital or paper copy of part or all of these works for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that the copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage AND that copies 1) bear this notice in full and 2) give the full citation o...

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Section: Figure 6: the Essay Topic Given To Students In Sadmentioning

confidence: 99%

Embedding Critical Thinking in IS Curricula

Thomas

Davis²,

Kazlauskas

2007

JITE:Research

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Studies of CT teaching in CS and other related disciplines [13][14][15][16][17][18] have shown that addressing CT topics in discipline-specific modules, both by explicitly introducing general CT principles and by reinforcing CT using discipline-specific cases, is beneficial for developing students' CT skills. While these studies use different teaching approaches and learning activities to promote CT, they have a commonality of using active learning strategies.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the subjects of BI, IS, and IMS, CT teaching was either conducted in separate modules [16,17] or integrated into domain-specific courses, such as 'Systems Analysis and Design' [13,18]. Ref.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Task-Based Approach to Teaching Critical Thinking for Computer Science Students

Mäkiö

2023

Education Sciences

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Critical thinking (CT) is one of the most important 21st-century skills that employers believe will grow in prominence. However, many higher education (HE) graduates often lack it. This is also true for graduates in computer science (CS) and related disciplines, who need CT to drive social and organizational digitalization. There are a number of strategies for teaching CT. However, there is no evidence regarding how to effectively teach CT in CS. To address this gap, this study proposes an educational approach that aims to promote CT to the students of CS and related disciplines. An educational experiment using this approach was conducted in two modules with similar content. The written reflections of 11 students on their development in CT and the quantitative data of students’ self-assessments of their CT skills and dispositions before (N = 20) and after (N = 11) the experiment were analyzed. Priority was given to the qualitative data. The results of this study support the hypothesis that the proposed approach has a positive impact on the development of students’ perceived CT skills. They also show that this approach stimulates and promotes students’ ability to transfer CT to other tasks and domains and to other contexts and situations. However, the positive development of students’ CT dispositions could not be demonstrated in this study, which can be explained by the short duration of this intervention.

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Critical Thinking and Reasoning for Information Systems Students

Cited by 2 publications

References 1 publication

Embedding Critical Thinking in IS Curricula

Embedding Critical Thinking in IS Curricula

The Task-Based Approach to Teaching Critical Thinking for Computer Science Students

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