Critical Thinking and Chinese International Students: An East-West Dialogue
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the West, the teaching of critical thinking, albeit differentially defined, is seen as the core of work at a graduate level. Despite the fact that developing such critical skills is increasing as an expectation of schools in the West, the literature reflects concerns that Canadian educated students arrive at university unprepared to engage at the expected level of criticality. If this is true of domestic students, what is the situation facing those international students who were educated in intellectual traditions, such as China’s, where critical thinking, at least as understood in the West, is rarely encouraged, and often actually discouraged? Do such students arrive prepared to work at a post-secondary level that involves critical thinking? Do such students embrace or resist critical thinking when these skills are taught to them? Is teaching critical thinking to these students a legitimate scholarly pursuit or is it, in effect, a neocolonial conceit? Can the Asian notion of harmony be reconciled with the Western notion of often-times sharp engagement with ideas and debate with their classmates and instructors? The authors, one a Canadian born and raised professor of comparative and international education to Chinese students studying in Canada, the other, a Chinese scholar who recently completed her doctorate in Canada where she now teaches, engage in a dialogue on Western concepts of critical thinking and the reaction of one class of Chinese international students to this pedagogy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".