‘TIP’ Reflective Writing Model: A Tool to Enhance Learners’ Critical Thinking Skills in English Literature Education
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Abstract
This study aimed to develop a new reflective writing model to enhance critical thinking skills of students in English literature education while also addressing the gap in the research fields of reflective writing and critical thinking skills. The study focused on ninety-eight second-year English majors of the School of Liberal Arts, Mae Fah Luang University who enrolled in the Study of Poetry and Drama course of the second semester, academic year 2021. The research team developed a new reflective writing model by synthesizing from previous studies including Gibbs’ reflective cycle (1988), Rolfe’s reflective model, and the DEAL model by Ash and Clayton (2009). The new model called TIP (Tell-Investigate-Prepare) was designed to be compatible with English literature courses’ instructional fashion to lessen the complexity of reflective writing and provide sufficient freedom for students to reflect their learning experiences. The seven characteristics of a person with critical thinking by Bernstein & Isaac (2018) were applied as a framework for the content analysis to explore learners’ critical thinking skills. In the results, thirty-six out of ninety-eight learners possessed seven comprehensive critical thinking characteristics – 1) problem identification 2) question clarification 3) logic argument 4) evidence/supportive information 5) synthesis of ideas 6) references 7) problem-solving. Moreover, all reflective writings contained one writing style, ‘describing’, which was not a critical thinking characteristic by Bernstein and Isaac (2018). There were 1,076 instances where describing was used. The second and third frequencies were referring to learned materials (580 times) and identifying problems (404 times) which were the characteristics of a person with critical thinking (Bernstein & Isaac, 2018). Therefore, the TIP model could be an effective guideline to enhance learners’ critical thinking skills.
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References
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