Saudi students’ flying the nest of "knowledge": reality and prospects [articol]

Abstract

The paper investigates Saudi university students’ traditional and predominant learning strategies of "remembering" and the prospects of persuading them to adopt higher learning strategies like "understand", "apply", "analyse", "evaluate", and "create". The study was conducted with 33 fourth year students of the Department of English of King Khalid University, Saudi Arabia, who were never formally trained for critical thinking. The researcher tried to instil critical thinking skills in one of their courses for one semester (42 contact hours) by adopting heuristic teaching method and challenging students’ cognitive skills in the tests. Statistical data analysis of their final examination scores confirms the widely acknowledged view that they are very good in memorization. However, after completing the course, they were found to be able to reduce their dependence on "remembering" as they had developed their learning domains of "understand", "apply" and "analyse" if not those of "evaluate" and "create". The paper concludes that if the students’ critical thinking skills can be developed to this extent in a stand-alone course in such a short time, a combined and synchronized effort of all the course teachers throughout the students’ academic career would be able to develop all higher order cognitive skills, including "evaluate" and "create", in a much better way.