3. Learning to
Develop Student Capability for Critical Thinking
Presenters: A. Faye Borthick, Georgia State University
Carol W. Springer, Georgia State University
Ronald S. Barden, Georgia State University
Description: The session
focuses on pedagogy for developing and assessing the critical-thinking
capabilities increasingly required in the practice of accounting. Participants
will learn how to recognize: (1) critical thinking in accounting courses, (2)
the kinds of learning experiences associated with its development, (3) ways to
assess critical thinking, and (4) instructional strategies for facilitating
student development of critical thinking. Learning experiences matter because
traditional pedagogy has not typically fostered critical-thinking skills.
Assessment matters because students take their study cues from how they are
assessed. Because critical thinking may be as unsettling to instructors as to
students, the session reveals strategies for shifting from instructions as
"covering the material," e.g., through lecture, to instruction as
"developing student skills," e.g., through guiding student efforts to
recognize and reconcile competing viewpoints. Just as new students need time to
develop critical-thinking capabilities, instructors need time to learn and
appropriate the new facilitative behaviors that critical thinking requires.
Instructors need not hear that pedagogy for critical thinking will lead to less
mastery of accounting concepts and procedures. On the contrary,
critical-thinking pedagogy has been associated with increased fluency with
concepts and procedures, which makes it all the more desirable.
