Evaluating and cultivating first-year college student’s critical thinking skills for the Sino-China English for academic purpose program

The purpose of this research was to identify whether the implantation of specific critical thinking (CT) conglomerate involving Problem Based Learning (PBL) activities and the Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) approach would improve Chinese students CT level whilst completing their first year Sino English for Academic program (EAP). A Quasi-experiment was piloted at a University in the People’s Republic of China, which was formed by Mr. Xi Jinping, who became the President of China in 2012. Chinese students are increasingly looking to study at Anglophone universities. However, Anglophone universities assume an approach to learning that involves critical thinking. Yet, studies that have adopted measures of critical thinking have shown that critical thinking is not prevalent to the same extent by Chinese students. Regardless of the study on the subject, there is limited research on the impact of critical thinking programs such as the Sino English for Academic program in China.A non-randomized two groups, pretest-posttest design was conducted to examine first year college student’s critical thinking level. The Critical thinking disposition was measured by implementing the California Critical Thinking Skills Test (CCST) in the Traditional Chinese version. There were 60 students, 47 females and 13 males between 19-21 years of age, randomly selected and placed in two groups who participated in this study. The result showed that the intervention improves students’ overall CCST mean score compared to the controlled group. The data revealed that the intervention group significantly scored higher on three of the five CCTST subscales. Whereas a negative variance CCST mean score of the controlled group was verified during the posttest analysis. The intervention group that was taught using the PBL and CLT approach increase student scores compared to a control group. As a result, the intervention would seem to provide one way to expand Chinese student’s critical thinking scores to prepare for study at Anglophone universities.