An Analysis on Students’ Thinking Complexity through Their Writing in a General Education Course

Abstract

To understand and evaluate students’ thinking habits and abilities, as well as to assess the effectiveness of the course, a Narrative Qualitative Analysis (NQA) was conducted to study students’ writing assignments submitted to a compulsory General Education course, “In Dialogue with Nature”, at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Based on the Wolcott-Lynch (WL) model, students’ written assignments in this course were analyzed, from which their overall thinking patterns and characteristics were studied. It is found that around 80% of the students are clustered within the lowest two thinking performance patterns of the WL model called Confused Fact-Finder and Biased Jumper. Moreover, the students' representative thinking components were extracted to reveal their general thinking habits. Although the overall thinking performance patterns of the students always stay the same within one term, improvement can be observed by analyzing individual thinking components.