Learners' Critical Thinking Characteristics in Asynchronous Online Discussion

Abstract

With the development of the Internet and the explosive increase of information, the ability of critical thinking to identify, discriminate and utilize the Internet information has become a significant skill of digital literacy. Asynchronous online discussion is an important way to cultivate learners' critical thinking, which has been widely adopted by MOOC and SPOC. Focusing on the characteristics of learners' critical thinking in the asynchronous online discussion, this research adopted the content analysis method, and used Newman's critical thinking depth coding schema to analyze learners' discussion text in a Digital Reading Online Course. The analysis showed that learners could express their opinions by integrating external knowledge and experience appropriately in asynchronous online discussion, but lack of a sense of evidence-based expression, which resulted that learners' expressions are full of opinions while lack of proofs. Besides, learners were weak in clarifying themselves, so they often gave ambiguous and unclear ideas. The findings are consistent with the situation of writing education in Chinese, which emphasizes opinions, emotions and rhetoric, but does not value the importance of evidence-based writing and accurate expression.