Using Socratic Questioning to Promote Students’ Critical Thinking Skills

บทคัดย่อ

Learning only the basic English knowledge and skills through textbooks and workbooks makes students lack of critical thinking skills. The art of Socratic questioning is important for the critical thinker because the art of questioning is important to excellence of thought. The objective was to study the development of students’ critical thinking skills by using Socratic questioning. The target group consisted of 10 students in 8th grade of Khon Kaen Wittayayon School enrolling in Fundamental English course. The research instruments developed and selected by researchers included 1) 6 lesson plans of teaching, 2) 2 short stories, and 3) 6 questions by applying Socratic questioning for assessing and evaluating students’ critical thinking. The interview was administered with students for 5 minutes. The quantitative data was analyzed by average score and percentage. The content analysis was used to analyze qualitative data.

The result was found that after using Socratic questioning, students’ critical thinking skills develop significantly. There were 9 students who passed the criteria 70 percent considered as 90 percent. Also, the average score of students’ answering through 6 questions based on Socratic questioning was 83.85 percent. That is, over 70 percent of students had passed the criteria set by researchers. With the interview, it was found that students had good attitude towards learning English, especially reading section. They like to read short stories and answer the questions. They said that the questions made them think and focus on the stories. Therefore, Socratic questioning could support 8th grade students to think critically.