Effect of Critical Thinking-infused Paragraph Writing Instruction on University First-year Students’ Argumentative Paragraphs Writing Performance

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of critical thinking-infused paragraph writing instruction on university first-year students’ argumentative paragraph writing performance. In order to achieve the purpose, two randomly selected intact classes with 31 and 32 participants were involved in the study as a non-treatment group and a treatment group respectively. The treatment group was provided with critical thinking-infused paragraph writing instruction, but the non-treatment group received a conventional paragraph writing instruction. The embedded design was employed in the study since it was mainly conducted using quantitative data gathered through tests before and after the intervention, and a semi-structured interview was also employed to gather data about the treatment from some randomly selected participants in the treatment group. The quantitative data were entered into SPSS version 20 and analysed using descriptive statistics and one-way between groups ANCOVA while the qualitative data were analysed by narrating the reactions of the randomly selected participants using words. The one-way ANCOVA results for argumentative paragraph writing performance scores F (1, 60) = 106.555, p = 0.000, partial Eta squared = 0.640) showed that there was statistically a significant difference between the non-treatment and the treatment groups in their argumentative paragraph writing performance due to the intervention (Critical thinking-infused paragraph writing instruction). The interview analysis result also revealed that the intervention guided participants in the treatment group to perform better while they wrote argumentative paragraphs. Thus, it was recommended that EFL instructors, curriculum (syllabus) designers, and material developers need to integrate critical thinking instruction into argumentative paragraph writing lessons in order to promote first-year students’ argumentative paragraph writing performance.