The development of critical thinking skills using a Web-based video analysis system

Our Web environment’s tools for video analysis and writing afford a series of activities designed to promote critical thinking. Students analyze videos by selecting and annotating brief segments they can later use as evidence to support claims they make in an essay. In addition to the educational objective of making students more adept observers and interpreters of the content, a high-level goal of these activities is to help students adopt what the critical thinking literature terms an “evaluativist” approach to knowledge, meaning that students construct their understanding by evaluating and interpreting the evidence before them, developing personal theories, and taking in to account opposing standpoints and knowledge (Kuhn, 1999). We measure students’ development of these skills by their use of the components of an informal argument: a central claim and supporting evidence, relational statements to connect evidence to claims, and reflective statements to mark the boundaries of their knowledge, acknowledge alternative interpretations, and suggest possible methods for obtaining needed evidence. Preliminary results show that students create increasingly sophisticated argument structures and begin to show signs of an evaluativist approach to the material.