Teaching Critical Thinking Skills and Its Impact on Academic Achievement

To test the effectiveness of teaching critical thinking skills on academic achievement, two high school junior-year groups of students were selected. One group initially learned how to think critically in to weeks according to Paul Model. Using Watson-Glasser test of critical Thinking Skills, and a History test, both group's knowledge in History and critical thinking skills were measured and then the experimental group went through seven weeks of learning History utilizing the skills learned in two weeks of skill learning, while the other group learned the same material without knowing or using such skills. The results show that those who learned and used the critical thinking skills not only improved their thinking skills, but improved in History achievement as well (at 0.01 level of significance).