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Integrated courses of natural science in high school as a tool to form high-order thinking
One of the conditions for human success in today's high-tech world is critical thinking. In this regard, the education of many countries, including Russian education, is actively seeking effective ways of its development. Integrated scientific disciplines have a great, but not yet sufficiently evaluated potential for the development of critical thinking, as they, firstly, are based on the methods of scientific cognition, and secondly, are aimed at an integrated consideration of problems from the perspective of different natural sciences. Therefore, the aim of the study was to identify ways to develop and diagnose critical thinking of students when studying integrated science disciplines.
The work involved methods of analysis and synthesis of scientific and methodological research on the development of critical thinking, as well as teaching materials on integrated science disciplines.
The analysis of sources made it possible to identify such significant components of critical thinking as creative, rational, logical, reflexive and metacognitive thinking. To develop these components, five key critical thinking skills have been identified on the basis of the assessment of the potential of integrated natural science disciplines: the ability to reach reasonable conclusions based on a chain of logical reasoning; the ability to model real objects,
processes and phenomena; the ability to think with open mind, recognizing and evaluating the reliability of information; the ability to make hypotheses and propose ways to test them; the ability to generate ideas to solve a specific problem. The ways of forming these skills in the learning process have been defined.
Assessment of students' critical thinking dynamics was carried out using a specially developed diagnostic toolkit in the form of a set of problem-situation tasks (STEM-cases - Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics). The results of the testing allow us to conclude that the identification of key skills and their systematic formation allow us to effectively develop critical thinking when studying integrated science courses.