Exploring debaters and audiences’ depth of critical thinking and its relationship with their participation in debate activities

Although debate was proven as a meaningful activity to practice college students’ critical thinking skills, the traditional face-to-face debate carried out in physical classroom has some obvious shortcomings. Only a few students could be selected as debaters, while most audiences have no opportunity to express their thoughts about debate topics. In this study, a novel form of debate was used to encourage all students in a class to participate in debate, which allows both debaters and audiences to engage in debate with the support of an online discussion board. Students’ depth of critical thinking was supposed to be closely related to their practice. The study aimed to explore debaters and audiences’ depth of critical thinking and its relationship with their number of speeches/online posts in an undergraduate course. Newman's critical thinking analysis framework was used as an analysis tool. Results indicated that: (1) averagely speaking, the winning team demonstrated a higher depth of critical thinking, and their number of speeches was relatively more than that of the teams with lower debate scores; (2) debaters’ depth of critical thinking was negatively correlated to their number of speeches; (3) audiences’ depth of critical thinking was not significantly correlated to their number of online posts; (4) debaters’ overall depth of critical thinking was relatively lower than that of audiences. Based on the findings, suggestions were put forward. More studies are encouraged to be carried out in more courses from diverse disciplines and with different sizes or different forms (face-to-face, blended or online). Instructors may redesign course assessment criteria and utilize incentive measures to encourage both debaters and audiences to express their viewpoints more frequently. Class observers may be arranged to make a record about the quality of debaters’ speeches. Further studies may explore debaters’ depth of critical thinking in preparing phases. More studies could be carried out to explore the online asynchronous debate.