Developing High School Students’ Critical Thinking in Online Debates: A Mixed Methods Study

Although critical thinking has shown to be an important twenty-first century skill, many students are leaving high school lacking such skills to succeed in a modern society. The purpose of this convergent mixed methods study was to examine how a structured weekly online debate, rooted in the constructivist theory, impacted high school students’ critical thinking skills in an English course. Debate groups received increasingly complex prompts each week and participated in required periods of reading, reflecting, writing, and responding. The Cornell Critical Thinking Test was used as a pre- and post-test to measure the impact of the intervention on student critical thinking skills. In addition, student discussion posts were analyzed at the beginning, middle, and end of the intervention with the Holistic Critical Thinking Scoring Rubric to examine how critical thinking skills evolved. A purposively selected subset of students participated in focus group interviews about their perceptions of how online debate impacted their ability to critically think. Results indicated that online debate positively impacted student critical thinking skills. Implications for developing secondary school students’ critical thinking are discussed.