The Effect of Critical Thinking Skill on Examination Performance
Dr Joseph Lee and Niki Cheong
INTI College, Malaysia
Business education which encompasses a broad range of philosophies and techniques is aimed
to develop an understanding of core theories and practical principles of the global
environment to meet the current organization needs. The learning outcome, which in
practice is represented by the years of education completed usually equips students with
the necessary technical knowledge, but how to develop creativity and analyticl and
problem-solving skills remains as a chalenge to many.
This challenge seems to be of particular interest to some of the U.K. universities who
have established full degree programmes in Malaysia aa the educational culture of Malaysia
differes from that of the U.K. Newman and Lee (1999) suggests that students in Malaysia
are “seeking wisdom” rather than “learning to think for themselves”
and students are not expected to chalenge or question the “experts.” An
experiemental module was therefore designed and introduced to enhance learning by
“thinking” (Kolb, 1993) and to encourage concentrating on the
“deeper”, associative (synthesis and evaluation) levels of knowledge (Bloom,
1972). The focus of this study is to evaluate th effectiveness of this experiemental
module.
The analytical framework of this study extends the previous work concerning the
correlation of critical thinking and academic performance of students (eg, Jenkins, 1988;
Cook, 1997). The sample consists of students enrolled in an auditing module offered at a
provate college in Malaysia in collaboration with a U.K. university of which some students
were and some were not participants of the experiemental module on critical thinking
skill. A decomposition model is used to determine if there are significant differences
between groups.
Preliminary findings suggest whether the student has taken this experimental module is a
significant predictor variable for students’ performance in the auditing module while
the effects of previous academic achievement, gender and age are mixed.