Abstract
It is imperative for higher education to cultivate students’ critical thinking ability through general education courses. Nevertheless, it is not clear about the teaching effectiveness of the general education on critical thinking in colleges. One of the reasons is that the critical thinking is extremely difficult to measure quantitatively. Therefore, there are very limited previous studies that empirically evaluate the effectiveness of general education on critical thinking. The study focuses on the performance evaluation of the critical thinking ability through general education courses in T University, and then investigates how the concept of critical thinking can be well practiced in the general education courses. There are four purposes of this study: First, the weight setting of the core ability about critical thinking will be analyzed to understand how those courses enhance students’ ability. Second, the syllabi of general education courses are inspected to know how to cultivate the critical thinking through these courses. Third, we assess whether the general education courses are able to contribute to the career plan. Finally, we discuss whether the course design by instructors really matches the students’ learning outcome on critical thinking. The results of this study shows that the general education courses at T University really put focus on cultivating the students’ critical thinking, feelings and the satisfaction. This study also proposes some policy suggestions that can enrich the investigation in the critical thinking of general education courses.