Lectura, escritura y debate como herramientas para el desarrollo del pensamiento crítico en el tercero de BGU

Abstract

Critical thinking is the basis of the comprehensive training of students. A person's cognitive abilities depend on this skill, since it develops the ability to adapt to the world independently. Its foundations are laid, for the most part, during high school education. However, many students have poor use of the cognitive skills that constitute this ability. For this reason, the objective of this work is to develop the critical thinking of high school students through the cognitive tools of reading, writing and debate. For this, our methodology was based on the principles of the action research method, which consists of identifying deficiencies, counteracting them with the execution of a proposal and verifying its effectiveness with its results. The work was implemented in the students of the third level of BGU (unified general baccalaureate) of the “Ciudad de Cuenca” school. To support this proposal, we start from the theory of self-regulation of thought; inference and extraction of levels of meaning in reading; writing as a form of organization of ideas; and argumentative skills. The results of the diagnosis revealed that students do not use the appropriate tools to analyse problems and offer a solid position on them. The results of the evaluation, after the applied classes, revealed a notable improvement in their capacity for analysis and argumentation. With this research, we aim to contribute to education studies in the area of critical thinking.