Abstract
The Rain Classroom, grounded in the theory of connectivism in the digital era, is a mobile-supported tool for blended learning. This tool renders synchronous and asynchronous teacher-student interactions through dual-channel teaching in and out of class. In the study, the Critical Thinking Skills Survey (CTSS) was adopted to measure the critical thinking skills (CTS) of 112 first-year undergraduates majoring in English in mainland China. A pretest-posttest non-equivalent two-group quasi-experimental design was applied to compare the CTS of those learners of English as a second language (L2) instructed under the Rain-Classroom-based intelligent learning system with those taught by the traditional lecture approach. The mixed results indicated that the intelligent learning system had a positive effect on students’ overall CTS development with significant improvement in the interpretation subscale but had almost no influence on the evaluation and self-regulation subscales. The intelligent learning approach in this study is empirically meaningful in students’ CTS enhancement, but further research is warranted to make this system more efficacious in facilitating L2 learners’ CTS.
Highlights
1.1 Critical Thinking (CT)In this increasingly technologically complex world, learning is taking place in an environment that is characterized by superabundance of information (Yang & Wu, 2012)
Having reviewed the research on the Technology-Integrated Instruction (TII) strategies’ cultivation of students’ critical thinking skills (CTS), especially among L2 learners, the present study aims to make its own contributions to the literature by investigating the impacts of a Rain Classroom-based intelligent learning system, which is exclusive to China, on the CTS of L2 learners with the following two research questions: 1) Is the intelligent learning system helpful to enhance L2 learners’ overall CTS?
No significant difference was identified between the mean scores of both overall skills (P=0.598) and six subskills of CTS for the two groups at the pretest (Table 5)
Summary
In this increasingly technologically complex world, learning is taking place in an environment that is characterized by superabundance of information (Yang & Wu, 2012). Digital storytelling has turned out to be effective in CT-infused L2 classrooms (Sevilla-Pavón & Nicolaou, 2017; Yang &Wu, 2012), since students need to critically analyze and interpret the stories they listen to and create their own based on critical theorizing and reflection to persuade their audience (Malita & Martin, 2010) This process is significantly correlated with students’ interpretation and evaluation skills, two components of CTS (Yang & Wu, 2012). The Rain Classroom integrates courseware release prior to class, real-time feedback, multi-screen virtual-classroom interaction and review after class This tool is distinguishable by its dual-channel teaching, where the teacher and students communicate synchronously and asynchronously in and out of class, and students’ whole-process learning data is generated and collected automatically by the system (Li & Song, 2017; Wang, 2017)
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