Grade 9 technology teachers’ explication of critical thinking and its enactment in the classroom

Abstract

The South African Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement for Technology stipulates that Technology should provide learners with the opportunity to solve authentic problems that are embedded in real-life experiences. Solving these authentic technological problems requires learners to use critical thinking skills and teachers are expected to support learners in this regard. Questions around teachers’ perspectives of what constitutes critical thinking and their ability to support the development of critical thinking skills in Technology classrooms are rarely asked. It is in this regard that this study sought to explore Grade 9 Technology teachers’ understanding of critical thinking and how they develop critical thinking skills in their classrooms through the use of a mini-Practical Assessment Tasks. The study applied a multiple case study design, in which a literal replication strategy was used to identify consistent patterns of description of the six participants’ understanding and enactment of critical thinking in practice. Facione’s framework for critical thinking was used to guide the analysis of interview and classroom observational data for various stages of the design process. The participants’ understanding of the notion critical thinking brought about four conceptions of critical thinking skills, namely interpretation, analysis, evaluation and inference. The results of the study show that there is a huge discrepancy between what Technology teachers say and what they do in reality, highlighting the difficulty of translating and employing critical thinking skills in the classroom setting.