The Education and Manpower Bureau (EMB) will commence the system of a three-year senior secondary academic structure in September, 2009 (Liberal Studies i). Under the new system, Liberal Studies will be a core curriculum of higher education (Liberal Studies 1). It is a good idea that involving Liberal Studies in to the curriculum. However, the main areas the course covered is excluding the thinking methodology. This is quite weird that the aim of the course is enabling the student to become more critical-thinking and creative while the method of thinking is missing (Liberal Studies 10).
Methodologically, Bloom’s Taxonomy states out that the level of thinking can be divided in six levels, which are Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation (Wikipedia). In 2001, Anderson and Krathwohl categorize the later three levels—Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation into the same group and place it as the highest level of thinking (Wikipedia). The Critical Thinking Community indicates these three levels are elements of critical thinking (www.criticalthinking.org). Therefore, critical thinking should take a vital part of Liberal Studies, which means methodology of thinking should become the forth main areas.
Students will be benefited immediately with this methodology. Since Liberal Studies require students to think and discuss logically, having appropriate skill of thinking will let them handle the subject much easier. Brian, who has been a student of Liberal Studies, states that in this subject, teacher requires quality rather than quantity; he also thinks that it is quite difficult to find out some unique arguments. Michelle, another Liberal Studies student, thinks that quantity is also an important part, since it reflects that the plenitude of your argument (video.mingpao.com). It is a case of needing critical thinking skills. Being critical thinkers, they will be motivated in desiring evidence and welcome to alternate interpretations (Learning to Learn 212). That means critical thinking will open your mind, widen your horizon, and have better knowledge and thoughtfulness, thus, you can perform in Liberal Studies well.
With critical thinking, students are able to perform better not only in one subject, but also in whole studying life in both high school and college. Since, critical thinking includes the processes of analysis, synthesis, and evaluation, it will let the students have deeper cognition of the subjects, and better memory of it too. When students analyze a topic or apply real-life experience into the topic, they can get a better encoding specificity which means they memorize the content more effectively (Gerrig and Zimbardo 210). In evaluation, students can ask themselves different questions to have brain-storming, this process will allow more words and clearer concept to be carried out. Therefore, students will be more well-known in the subjects. When students try to synthesize or summarize something, they need to review the materials, connecting the relation of them, and combining them into a new presence. This reconstructing process allow them to digest the content of those materials, this will increase their cognition of those subjects, even more, generating a new idea or concept. As the result, students can see that they can have better performance in studying through the appropriate skills of critical thinking.
Surely, people may think involving one more main area will burden both the teachers’ and students’ work. Actually, I think the high school student is not necessary to study the methodology of critical thinking as deep as a bachelor. In practice, it may just demonstrate the skills of critical thinking and the errors of it. These are enough to the high school level, since the purpose of introducing methodology of critical thinking is strengthening the ability of handling the new core curriculum and other subjects. Therefore, this is just an introduction level, and takes a semester to go through the chapter. The quality of teachers is also concerned by different people, some may think that teachers may not have enough ability to handle this new core curriculum. In order to solve this problem, our government will cooperate with colleges to develop critical thinking and creativity in the teacher development programs (Education Bureau).
Liberal Studies is like an arrow on the bowstring, it is an inevitable trend to academia and society. This is not just important to the students and teachers, but also everyone in the community, no one can escape from this trend. Maybe we do not need to take the course of Liberal Studies, but we should encourage the students, who will play the major role in the society, to take this course including thinking methodology.
I believe that all of us who have been student will have the same studying experience—Forget. Although we have spent an amount of time on studying a subject, we will find ...
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