Critical Thinking Ability and Performance in Argumentative Essays of the Education Major Students

Abstract

—The study was carried out to assess the relationship between students' critical thinking abilities and their success in writing an argumentative essay. The descriptive-correlation design was used in this research. The respondents in this survey were a total of 310 Education major students. This is 22.32 percent of the 1387 students enrolled in the Education program. The 50-item questionnaire was based on the Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal from Pearson TalentLens to measure the student's study critical thinking abilities. The following conclusions were drawn: the students lack critical thinking ability; the students have difficulty in constructing argumentative essays; and the less critical the students are, the less performance they have in writing argumentative essays.