Enhancing Critical Thinking Through Reading in a Controlled Environment: A Study Using the BookRoll Tool

Abstract

Critical thinking is a vital skill in many aspects of a person’s activities, particularly in education, where it enables students to analyze, reason, plan, and self-evaluate. This paper propose a controlled environment designed to train critical thinking through reading, helping students understand logical connections between sentences. This controlled environment is designed for learner’s activities to assign several kinds of annotations including logical statement type, keyword and logical linking between sentences to the proper writing text by self-analysis under the supervision of coaches. By engaging in these activities, students can learn to recognize logical expressions and persuasive strategies in writing, gain insight into the author’s cognitive processes, and apply these insights to improve their writing abilities. We enhanced the features of BookRoll, an e-book system developed by Kyoto University, to increase its efficiency and better support the tracking of students' reading behaviors. The system records various activities, including time spent on each page, highlighting keywords within sentences, and identifying logical connections between sentences, among other metrics. From experiments, the results showed that the environment helps to increase learning performance. The average precision and recall scores from tagging of the participants using this feature were higher than the participants not using the tool for 0.15 and 0.22, respectively. Moreover, the participants showed significant growth in thinking skills in terms of more correct analysis and critical thinking after using the tool. These results indicated that the thought analysis tool improved users' abilities to become more strategic planners and create more persuasive writing.

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Author Information
Panadda Jaiboonlue, Bansomdejchaopraya Rajabhat University, Thailand
Wasan Na Chai, National Electronics and Computer Technology Center, Thailand
Nattapol Kritsutikul, National Electronics and Computer Technology Center, Thailand