Data-Driven Problem-Solving and Chinese Students'' Critical Thinking

This study applied an English version of a data- driven software system to promote Chinese medical students'' critical thinking in Taiwan. The students were not familiar with problem-based learning or this English version system. The findings report two important things. One is that Chinese students'' thinking skills could be promoted using their own patterns, which involve students'' background, age, group members'' influence/interaction, and etc. The other is that the students'' thinking orientations and responses to the system are very different from the anticipation of the system''s designers. The cultural gap and difference in this case provides instructional designers with ideas when designing technological systems for different cultural and language users. This study defined the indicators of critical thinking as inquiry, analysis, inference, and decision-making, and used this definition to establish codes to explore students'' thinking patterns when they responded to each stage of the data-driven software—ActionOrganizer. Kuhn''s inquiry model and Barrows'' PBL model were major models supporting the interpretation of the findings.