TEACHING ACTIVITY AND EVALUATION OF CRITICAL THINKING IN PRIMARY SCHOOL

Abstract

The aim of this work is to verify the efficacy of a training program focused on the enhancement of critical thinking skills, realized with a group of children between the ages of 9 and 11 years, in the last year of primary school in the Palermo area. At school as in life, critical thinking skills are fundamental; these skills concern above all the integrated processing of information, the correct use of reasoning, the adequate formulation of judgments, the taking of autonomous and controlled choices. Technological expansion fuels the children and young people’s difficulties to organize the knowledge data, coming from several sources, in a coherent and logical way as well as to evaluate information and use it. Systematic educational interventions are not always planned and implemented at school for exercising and evaluating in the students skills such as the generation of original ideas, the expression of personal beliefs, the development of hypotheses for the effective solution of problems, the construction of action plans for defined purposes. To design training aimed at promoting the ability to think critically, it is necessary to have indicators of development and assessment of the skills involved, chosen and validated in the field. In this direction, an observational survey was carried out on a group of 37 students attending the fifth grade of primary school. The objective of the analysis was to collect data and indications which, in the light of a specific and shared theoretical framework, were used to identify, in the children, the behaviors which expressed critical abilities. The outcome of the research procedure was the construction of a useful assessment tool, to detect the critical thinking skills which interact with creative thinking; indicators are a guide for development by children in the last year of primary school.