Using Critical Thinking Styles of Opinion Leaders to Drive Extension Communication

Abstract

In order to address the complex challenges facing the agricultural and natural resource industry, extension educators must collaborate with opinion leaders. Extension educators can use the assistance of opinion leaders in program design and implementation in order to best meet the needs of stakeholders and the public. Collaboration between extension educators and opinion leaders is more easily conducted when each party understands one another's cognitive style and communication channel preference. This study explored the relationship between opinion leader critical thinking style among three contextual issue groups in agriculture and natural resources and preferred communication preferences used by extension educators. The three contextual issue groups included opinion leaders from the areas of water, food safety, and genetic modification (GM). Researchers used the University of Florida Critical Thinking Inventory (UFCTI) to measure critical thinking style of 300 respondents in Florida. Each of the contextual issue groups preferred engagement with information as their preferred critical thinking style. Among the contextual issue groups, significant differences were identified between the water and food safety groups in the information seeking UFCTI score and the GM and food safety groups in the information engagement score. The preferred method of receiving information overall was visiting a website.

Assessing the Dimensional Validity and Reliability of the University of Florida Critical Thinking Inventory (UFCTI) in Chinese: A Confirmatory Factor Analysis

“…The existing instruments for assessing Chinese students' critical thinking emphasized measurement of disposition components with little or no consideration given to critical thinking style. The UFCTI is an established instrument for assessing critical thinking style that has been used in agricultural disciplines for over a decade (Gorham et al, 2014;Leal et al, 2017;Putnam et al, 2017). This study translated the original UFCTI into Chinese and assessed the validity and reliability of the UFCTI Chinese version by using a sample of Chinese agriculture undergraduate students.…”

“…Previous studies in agricultural disciplines have utilized the UFCTI to investigate the relationship between critical thinking style and water conservation behaviors (Gorham et al, 2014), food safety behavior (Leal et al, 2017), and opinion leader's communication behavior (Putnam et al, 2017). Akins et al (2019) investigated the enhancement of critical thinking after integrating case studies into educational settings.…”

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“…The UFCTI has been established for 10 years, and it has sound psychometric properties . Previous studies been applied UFCTI in the context of integrating critical thinking into agricultural education and extension programs, such as assessing the critical thinking styles of greenhouse growers , opinion leaders (Putnam et al, 2017), and international faculties (Barrick & DiBenedetto, 2019). The UFCTI consists of 20 statements assessing individuals' preferences for critical thinking styles on a five-point Likert-type scale, with 1 representing "strongly disagree" and 5 representing "strongly agree".…”

Testing An Adoption Decision-Making Model of Nursery and Greenhouse Growers’ Water Reuse in the United States

“…One "style" of critical thinking, the "way critical thinking is expressed, or performed, or done by an individual," can be expressed as a spectrum ranging from a style characterized by seeking out information to one focused on addressing a problem [17]. This study leverages one particular critical thinking style analysis tool-the University of Florida Critical Thinking Inventory (UFCTI)-which has proven useful in the context of studying decision-making in food and agricultural contexts [18].…”