The platform is divided into three main modules: user management, course .... introductory course of the Computer Science degree of the Agrarian University of.
A Knowledge-Based Platform for the Development of Critical Thinking Abilities Carlota Delgado-Vera(&), Maritza Aguirre-Munizaga, Evelyn Solis-Avíles, Andrea Sinche, and Néstor Vera-Lucio Faculty of Agricultural Sciences, Computer Science Department, Agrarian University of Ecuador, Av. 25 de Julio y Pio Jaramillo, P.O. BOX 09-04-100, Guayaquil, Ecuador {cdelgado,maguirre,esolis,asinche, nvera}@uagraria.edu.ec
Abstract. Critical thinking is closely related to the main objectives in current educational reforms worldwide. It permits to develop cognitive skills of interpretation, analysis, evaluation, inference, explanation, and auto-regulation, which are essential in today’s job market. Critical thinking is being implemented in different e-learning platforms with outstanding results. This paper presents an ontology-based platform for the development of critical thinking in universities. The platform is divided into three main modules: user management, course management and learning resources repository. A case study in the Agrarian University of Ecuador is presented and the results obtained by the use of the developed platform are promising. Keywords: Critical thinking resources Ontologies
Knowledge-based systems
Learning
1 Introduction The development of critical thinking [1] is gaining momentum in e-learning systems, because it is closely related to some of the main objectives of the current educational reforms, such as the creation of civic and ethical skills. Besides, professionals are required to have new skills related to the permanent learning and the development of the scientific thought. Some studies reveals the importance of critical thinking and investigation skills in higher education students that permit them to analyse, interpret and evaluate how theory can be applied to practice [2]. In fact, critical thinking is being implemented in different e-learning environments [3] with very satisfactory results. Formation of critical thinking is linked to the creation of capacities for lifelong learning, research, innovation and creativity [4]. It generates active and scientific minds, training students in reasoning, the logical thinking, the detection of fallacies, the intellectual curiosity, and problem solving. There are studies focused on the analysis of © Springer International Publishing AG 2016 R. Valencia-García et al. (Eds.): CITI 2016, CCIS 658, pp. 3–13, 2016. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-48024-4_1
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the efficiency of stimulating the critical thinking in academic subjects such as the work presented in [5]. On the other hand, knowledge-based technologies provide a consistent and reliable basis to face the challenges for organization, manipulation and visualization of the data and knowledge, playing a crucial role as the technological basis of the development of a large number of information systems [6]. In this context, an ontology defines a set of representational primitives allowing to model a domain of knowledge or discourse [7]. Nowadays, the use of ontologies in knowledge-based systems has significantly grown, becoming an important component in enhancing the Web intelligence and in supporting data representation. Indeed, ontologies are being applied to different domains such as Biomedicine [8], Finance [9], Innovation Management [10], Cloud computing [11, 12] and recommendation [13, 14], among others. This paper is structured as follows: Sect. 2 describes some related work. Section 3 introduces the platform presented in this paper, where the architecture design, modules and interrelationships of the proposed approach are described. The evaluation of the platform is explained with a case study in Sect. 4. Finally, conclusions and future work are presented in Sect. 5.
2 Related Work Critical thinking is an intellectual process that, in a decisively, deliberately and self-regulated way seeks to reach a reasonable judgment, a process that is characterized by an honest effort of interpretation, analysis, evaluation. Besides, the judgment can be explained or justified based on evidence, contextual considerations and criteria. Thinking critically mainly requires a set of intellectual and personal skills that can be applied to different domains such as software development [15]. Other works, such as the one presented in [16], focus on the use of critical thinking for the development of cognitive abilities through an interactive methodology. For the purpose of this research the Delphi method [17] was taken as a reference. This method exposes that critical thinking develops cognitive skills of interpretation, analysis, evaluation, inference, explanation, and auto-regulation. These skills are characterized when an intellectual process of high level is manifested. The fundamental skills of critical thinking in education are absolutely necessary to obtain the capacity for analysis, evaluation and the reflexive formulation of arguments. Educators must be aware of the necessity to promote the critic thinking in students to face effectively the new social and technological changes of the modern world. As it has been done in previous research [18], it is necessary to design and implement proposals or cognitive intervention software programs to develop the critical thinking into different education levels. In Fig. 1 the critical thinking skills are shown and explained. • Verbal reasoning and argument analysis skills: They allow to identify and evaluate the quality of ideas, coherent conclusions of an argument. • Hypothesis testing: Hypotheses are tentative ideas that represent possible solutions or explanatory reasons for a fact, situation or problem. They can explain, predict
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Fig. 1. Critical thinking skills
and control events of daily life. Hypothesis approaches promote new arguments that facilitate the construction of learning either by checking or contrasting processes. • Probability and uncertainty skills: They determine quantitatively the possibility that a given event may occur, in addition to analyzing and evaluating different alternatives that are necessary for decision making in a given situation, according to the advantages and disadvantages of this event. • Decision making and problem solving skills: They allow to exercise reasoning abilities in the recognition and definition of a problem from certain data, in the selection of relevant information. Besides, they permit to contrast different alternative solutions and their results.
3 The Knowledge Based Platform In this section the knowledge-based methodology and platform developed in this research is explained. This system is a web-based platform that was developed through a planned process and according to the curriculum defined by the National Secretary of Higher Education, Science, Technology and Innovation (SENESCYT1) entity, which deals with basic processes of thought, understanding, reading, communication, and verbal reasoning allowing a better development. Three different roles exist in the platform: the administrator, the teacher and student role. Different modules were developed for each role. For example the main functionality of the administrator is related to the courses and users (teachers and students) management. Teachers can develop different processes and teaching resources, such as units, video tutorials and exercises to encourage critical thinking in the students. Finally, students can access to the learning resources and assessment. These resources consist of the design of a website, or the presentation of activities, games and videos, which enables users to develop skills interacting with the platform. The development of the web application was based on the philosophical tendency called constructivism and meaningful learning [19] where the student learns by doing and building. The platform architecture is shown in Fig. 2. The platform is basically composed of three modules: user management, course management and learning resources repository. The user management module permits 1
http://www.educacionsuperior.gob.ec/.
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Fig. 2. System architecture
Fig. 3. Excerpt of the domain ontology
to manage users that will access to the system. The course management module permits to introduce different learning contents and learning resources for a specific course. Finally, the learning resource repository stores the learning resources published by teachers and they can be shared among different courses. More concretely, this repository is a large repository of exercises that can help in the development of critical thinking. There are different kinds of exercises: exercises for expanding and contraction of ideas, basic thinking processes, reading comprehension, verbal reasoning, and numerical reasoning. This classification is based on the work proposed in [16]. The learning resources repository uses an ontology to semantically represent each learning resource. This ontology contains information about the different kinds of resources and some terminology about the content of the resource. Figure 3 shows an excerpt of the domain ontology and some details of this ontology are shown in Table 1.
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Table 1. Details of the ontology Ontology Classes 210 Datatype properties 4 Object properties 16 Subclass_of relationships 234 Max. Depth of Class Tree 5 Min. Depth of Class Tree 2 Avg. Depth of Class Tree 3 Max. Branching Factor of Class Tree 9 Min. Branching Factor of Class Tree 1 Avg. Branching Factor of Class Tree 4
Students can access and interact with the system, by doing the activities and finding results of the evaluations, including the number of questions answered, and the number and percentage of hits. In addition, the student can access to a series of videos that are related to the development of critical thinking skills. In Figs. 4 and 5 two screenshots of the user interface are shown. This whole process will help students strengthen their knowledge, abilities, associated attitudes to the styles of convergent and divergent thinking, and logical, critical and creative reasoning, which are required for acting as critical and responsible learning managers through continuous personal growth.
Fig. 4. Screenshot of the web application
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Fig. 5. Screenshot of the web application
4 Case Study To evaluate the proposed methodology a teaching experience was performed in the introductory course of the Computer Science degree of the Agrarian University of Ecuador. Thus, different learning resources, such as video tutorials, logical exercises, reasoning activities and other tests were developed. These resources were related to introductory concepts in computer science such as binary code, algebra and algorithms. The course was taught by 4 professors and they suggested different activities to encourage the students’ critical thinking development. At the end of the teaching experiment students were asked to answer an opinion poll in order to show their perceptions, and whether the different practical works had allowed them to improve their critical thinking. This poll is based on the work presented in [20], and up to 100 students participated during 2015-2016. The opinion poll consisted of different questions (see Table 2) related to the experience. Our students evaluated each question by choosing a value between 1 and 5, where 1 means strongly disagree, 2 disagree, 3 neutral, 4 agree and 5 strongly agree. The students’ evaluation is shown in Table 3 and Fig. 6. As it can be seen in Table 3 the average of all questions is over 4, which means that students agreed with all the issues asked. In particular, the best results were obtained for questions 4 and 8 with an average of 4.54. On the other hand the worst results were obtained for questions Q6, Q7, Q12 and 16 with an average of 4.06, 4.04, 4.08 and 4.08, respectively. Finally, it is worth noting that the last three questions (Q18, Q19 and Q20) - more related to the experiment - obtained a very good mark, showing that students agree with the usefulness of the proposed framework.
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Table 2. Questions of opinion poll N Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Q5 Q6 Q7 Q8 Q9 Q10 Q11 Q12 Q13 Q14 Q15 Q16 Q17 Q18 Q19 Q20
Question Do you think that critical thinking contributes to understanding, giving opinion, deducing or judging any situation in a correct way? Do you think that the development of critical thinking helps in the teaching and learning process? Do you think that critical thinking helps to improve the students’ learning process and academic performance? Do you think that the development of critical thinking abilities is very important at every educational level? Do you think that the use of ICTs allows to generate, disseminate and socialize knowledge? Do you think that ICTs assure the students’ understanding? Do you agree that ICTs facilitate the complex instructions explanation? Do you agree that ICTs permit the development of interactive classes? Do you think that ICTs estimulates the students’ motivation for learning? Do you agree that ICTs contributes to universal information, communication and learning access? Do you think that ICTs improve people’s quality of life? Do you think that ICTs allows the use of images for education? Do you think that the use of ICTs improves the students’ memory? Do you think that ICTs facilitate learning and contribute to the development of critical thinking abilities? Do you think that it is better to do practical exercises using ICT than manually? Do you think that the use of multimedia tools contributes to critical thinking development? Do you think that critical thinking abilities can be obtained through logical excercises? Do you think that the proposed activities in the system improve the students’ critical thinking? Do you think that video tutorials contribute to critical thinking development? Do you think that the proposed system contributes to the development of critical thinking abilities?
The mode is also shown in Table 3. All the questions obtained a mode of 4 or 5, suggesting that the majority of students who answered the survey marked 4 or 5 in each question, so that they agree and strongly agree, respectively, with the proposed questions. Other conclusions of the survey are that 94 % of students think that critical thinking development contributes to improving the responsibility in students. In addition, 88 % answered that the use of ICTs improves people’s quality of life through the generation, dissemination and socialization of knowledge. Besides, having universal access to the information, communication and education increases motivation, and contributes to the development of critical thinking skills. In fact, 84 % believe that these ICTs tools ensure the understanding of academic content, as well as the explanation of complex instructions.
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5 48 48 48 58 52 22 20 58 52 40 40 26 46 40 48 24 36 48 48 48
4 48 48 46 38 36 62 64 38 36 48 48 56 48 48 50 60 62 50 44 46
3 4 4 6 4 12 16 16 4 12 12 12 18 6 12 2 16 2 2 8 6
2 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Average 4.44 4.44 4.42 4.54 4.4 4.06 4.04 4.54 4.4 4.28 4.28 4.08 4.4 4.28 4.46 4.08 4.34 4.46 4.4 4.42
Mode 5 5 5 5 5 4 4 5 5 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 5 5
Fig. 6. Results
On the other hand, many students prefer to develop reasoning exercises by using ICTs because the use of images and multimedia features contributes to the development of critical thinking. Furthermore, video tutorials and logical reasoning exercises favorably improve the intellectual and academic performance of students improving these skills themselves.
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5 Conclusion and Future Work The development of critical thinking skills is gaining momentum in e-learning environments and experts believe that these skills have to be developed in all the educational levels. This paper presents a knowledge-based methodology to promote critical thinking skills development in all courses in order to educate future critical professionals that are capable to solve problems taking into account the current social changes. This methodology was implemented on a web-based platform and an evaluation of the platform was done in the introductory course of the computer science degree of the Agrarian University of Ecuador. The platform allows students to improve their level of critical thinking, by encouraging them to build their own knowledge based on different exercises posed in the system. The case study presented in this work reveal that students believe that systems for promoting critical thinking in university courses are useful and should be implemented in other universities and courses. For that, a survey of 10 question was answered by 100 students of the computer science degree of the Agrarian University of Ecuador. The results show that almost all the students agreed the questions proposed by this case study. The platform will allow teachers to propose different activities to improve the students’ cognitive skills. However, the platform only permits to develop closed questions. As future work, it is planned to introduce some intelligent methodologies to automatically evaluate open questions like the work presented in [21]. In this work, semantic web and natural language processing technologies are applied for the automatic evaluation of open questions. Finally, it is also planned to extend the case study to different courses in the same degree in order to evaluate the platform with different students at different levels. A statistical evaluation of the effectiveness of the platform will be also performed. We will follow the study proposed in [22]. In this paper, a case study of a university-level course delivered by computer conferencing examined student participation and critical thinking is presented. It was guided by two purposes: (a) to determine whether the students were actively participating, building on each other’s contributions, and thinking critically about the discussion topics; and (b) to determine what factors affected student participation and critical thinking. The results suggest that the emergence of a dynamic and interactive educational process that facilitates critical thinking is contingent on several factors: appropriate course design, instructor interventions, content, and students’ characteristics. Acknowledgements. We would like to thank to the Agrarian University of Ecuador that supported this project.
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