An investigation to evaluate the effect of a freshman education program on the skills of critical thinking and logical writing

Abstract

It has been pointed that there is a conspicuous trend toward the weakening of university freshmenʼs motivation for study and sense of purpose. In this situation, we play an important role in enabling freshmen to understand how to tackle problems and learn by themselves. Therefore, we investigated the effect of a freshman education program on studentsʼ skills of critical thinking and logical writing. We evaluated the critical thinking and logical writing skills of 120 Kyushu Dental University students. First, we compared the total score of the skills using ratings based on a questionnaire method. Second, we judged the learning effectiveness of the freshman education program by using an achievement degree grasping system based on a critical thinking test. Finally, we administered a questionnaire survey to freshmen and faculty members before and after they attended the program in order to investigate how their impressions of the program changed. We observed that the freshman education program significantly enhanced the studentsʼ ability to confirm the validity of evidence for critical thinking and their attitude skills such as grasping the discussion and being focused on indirect noticing. Furthermore, the program also significantly improved the total skill score in the studentsʼ logical writing. The results of the questionnaire survey given to freshmen and faculty members suggested that we need to make further efforts to improve the freshmenʼs level of satisfaction.