Developing students' critical thinking abilities about environmental change using the discovery method of e-learning

Abstract

Background: Critical thinking matters a lot for students, especially when they have to deal with messy socio-scientific problems like environmental change. But middle school learners often still have skills that are kind of underdeveloped, even when teachers use conventional instruction. Then COVID-19 arrived, and e-learning got adopted more broadly, which actually opened a space to check whether discovery-based digital instruction can help critical thinking more than, traditional teaching does, in particular for rural areas and also for Islamic school settings. Objective: This study aims to see what happens when e-learning modules about environmental change are used, and how they might affect critical thinking abilities of eighth grade students. The indicators were adapted from well-known critical thinking frameworks, so the measurement is not random. Methods: We used a sequential explanatory mixed-methods approach. Basically, it mixed interviews , classroom observations, and essay tests. For the critical thinking indicators, we adapted items from D'Alessio, Janssen, and Koenig. There were seventy students in total, all eighth graders, coming from a rural middle school. The quantitative part used mean and standard deviation, while the qualitative side relied on interviews and observations. In the COVID-19 period, discovery learning was integrated into an e-learning platform within an Islamic school context. Result: The students’ critical thinking abilities could be grouped into three levels. There were 15 students (21.91%) in the high tier, 40 students (57.83%) in the intermediate tier, and another 15 students (23.47%) in the low tier. From the qualitative side, the e-learning instruction made students more motivated to seek information by themselves, quite independently, and in a more spirited, almost curious way. Still, overall critical thinking when dealing with environmental change topics did not reach the best possible level, and most students ended up clustering in that intermediate range, not the high one. Conclusion: The critical thinking abilities of middle school students around environmental change are still kind of not fully formed, even though e-learning can spark curiosity and encourage self directed discovery. In other words, more unconventional ways of teaching are really needed. For example, discovery learning that is blended with e-learning should be applied, especially when lessons have been impacted by the pandemic, and also in religiously affiliated school settings.