Abstract
Abstract: Critical thinking and creativity along with problem-solving skills have become basic competencies in an increasingly complex and technological world, in which an individual needs to be able to process information in a critical way, find alternative solutions, analyse complex problems, and formulate innovative solutions. As teachers, we train the children for occupations that have not been invented yet – an aspect that thus becomes clear is that it is no longer sufficient for the young students to perfectly execute given tasks, but they need to be able to solve new problems. To achieve this, they need to be able to consider the problem from multiple angles, to weight alternatives, to look critically at what needs to be solved, and to make well-thought and well-argued decisions. With this perspective in mind, developing such skills in pupils should be an essential goal for the teachers. Yet, unfortunately, training teachers for developing critical thinking skills in pupils comes short, in the Romanian educational system. This article presents the results of a traning course whose goal was to prepare mathematics schoolteachers to teach mathematics based on questioning and discovery, to help develop pupils’ crticical thinking skills. Analyzing the short- and long-term impact of our training course confirms the results obtained in OECD (2019) studies, namely that once teachers have been qualified to work in this way, they become more open to acting differently to stimulate the developing of critical thinking and creative skills in pupils.
Highlights
Out of 79 participating countries (OECD and partner countries), Romania was placed on the 47th position following the 2018 PISA tests and recorded a decrease in academic performance relative to the year 2015 – a score of 430 in mathematics and a score of 426 in sciences.More concerning is the fact that 47% of the pupils prove to be functionally illiterate in mathematics, as they are unable to employ basic arithmetic operations
Given the ability to develop critical thinking skills through mathematics and based on the evidence presented above indicating that critical thinking skills may be developed through questioning, interactive, and reflexive methods which facilitate learning by discovery, we developed a training program for the V-VIII grade mathematics teachers
The immediate impact of the training may be observed in the answers given once the training course was finalized, by comparison to the answers given in September 2016: the questioning method rises from the third to the first position in terms of importance (31%, by comparison to the initial 3%), while the learning by discovery method rises from 0% to 19%, occupying the third position in terms of importance
Summary
Out of 79 participating countries (OECD and partner countries), Romania was placed on the 47th position following the 2018 PISA tests and recorded a decrease in academic performance relative to the year 2015 – a score of 430 (relative to 444 in 2015) in mathematics and a score of 426 (relative to 435) in sciences. A part of the experimental intervention concerned training mathematics teachers from the south-west of Romania who were teaching at these classes to teach differently, namely based on questioning and learning by discovery The results of this experiment regarding the impact of the intervention on the pupils’ progress has been presented previously (Bădescu & Stan, 2019). While we used the Watson-Glaser test (Goodwin & Glaser, 2002) to evaluate the pupils’ performance, the impact of the intervention on the teachers was evaluated with questionnaires applied repeatedly at certain time intervals (2016, 2018) These measured the short-, medium-, and long-term impact on the potential changes in the teachers’ attitudes, concepts, and ways of acting when it comes to teaching mathematics and stimulating pupils’ critical thinking. We bring forward the obtained results and answer the following question: what kind of didactic strategies do V-VIII grade teachers report for stimulating pupils’ critical thinking through teaching mathematics? At the same time, we have tried to identify how mathematics teachers perceive the importance of developing critical thinking skills via mathematics-related activities
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