The Effect of Journal Writing on Students’ Cognitive Critical Thinking Skills A Quasi-Experiment Research on an EFL Undergraduate Classroom in Egypt
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Based on writing weekly academic journals and on Bloom’s (1984) taxonomy of cognitive critical thinking skills, this article reports on a quasi-experiment where journal writing was an additional task to an academic writing course. The experiment was carried out with first year university students (semester two) in one of the Egyptian private universities. Sixteen intermediate students represented the experimental group where weekly journals were a requirement; other seven students of the same level represented the control group that was taught exactly the same course and by the same instructor of the experimental group but with no journal writing. Pre and posttests were used to measure students’ critical thinking skills before and after the experiment. Measuring critical thinking skills using the available critical thinking assessment tests was not suitable for the purpose of the experiment since the intended skills were those associated with Bloom’s taxonomy not just reasoning and logical thinking. Therefore, the researcher, following Bloom’s taxonomy of cognition and inspired by the available critical thinking assessment tests, designed her own critical thinking assessment tool. This tool is an attempt to make use of any available materials to create one’s own instrument that could serve in the learning process. The newly modified tool was used in the pre and posttests. Results indicated that journal writing had contributed strongly to the development of the cognitive critical thinking skills of the experimental group, which validates the new assessment tool and proposes a new technique of developing critical thinking skills in Egypt.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".