136 Incorporating Critical Thinking Into a Regular High School Biology Curriculum Anat Zohar Pinchas Tamir Teachers College Columbia University New York, New York 10027 Science Education Center Hebrew University of Jerusalem Jerusalem, Israel 91904 Introduction Critical thinking has been defined as "suspension of judgement" (Mcpeck, 1981), as "the correct assessment of judgement" (Ennis, 1982) andas "reasonable reflective thinking focused on deciding what to believe or do" (Ennis, 1989). The third definition is more recent and more comprehensive and is used in this article. The development of critical thinking has been regarded since ancient times as one of the major aims of education (Resnick, 1987). Yet, studies have revealed rime and again that quite often students fail in tasks which require critical thinking (Jungwirth, 1985; Jungwirth & Dreyfus, 1990). Moreover, students who had studied the new inquiry-oriented science curricula of the 1960s performed as poorly as their traditional counterparts (Shuman & Tamir, 1973). It appears that critical thinking does not develop in passing but rather explicit and deliberate efforts are needed in order to develop it. Indeed, the results of several studies indicate that learning experiences explicitly designed to develop reasoning skills achieve their goal to various degrees (Friedler & Tamir, 1986; Kaplan, 1967;Pappalis,Pohlman,&Pappalis. 1980;Reif&St. John. 1979; Wheatly. 1975). Educators have been and are still debating on the best approach for enhancing the development of reasoning skills. Two major unresolved issues in this debate are: (a) to what extent reasoning skills are general, content-free or, rather, subject matter and concept specific abilities and (b) the extent to which and the circumstances under which transfer of critical thinking takes place. The answers to these questions have significant implications for instruction. The major dilemma is whether special courses should be designed for teaching thinking skills as implied by the general approach or, instead, infuse the development of thinking within regular disciplinary courses (Ennis, 1989; Mcpeck, 1981; Resnick, 1987). Perkins and Salomon (1989) have reviewed the debates and disagreements along with pertinent research and concluded that the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Critical thinking, like other reasoning skills, has at the same time both general and contentdependentattributes. Since the regular schoolcurriculum is already overcrowded, they predict that "wider scale efforts to join subject matter instruction and teaching of thinking will be one of the exciting stories of the next decade of research and educational innovations" (p. 24). Several examples of projects that were designed according to the general approach are Philosophy for Children (Lipman, 1985), Cort (De Bono, 1985), and Odyssey (Dominguez, Hemstein, Nickerson, Swets, & DeSa’nchez, 1986). Similarly, various projects have been designed according to the infusion approach. One of the disciplines in which such projects have been uttered is biology (Jungwirth, Dreyfus, & Amir, 1986; Moll & Alien. 1982; Novak & Dettloff, 1989; Statkievicz & Alien, 1983); however, routine use of specially designed activities has yet to be realized. This article describes the rationale and activities developed and mailed by a project entitled Biology Critical Thinking (BCT). The BCTprojectaims at developing a pool of activities1 which can be incorporated within the regular course of study without investing too much extra time (Meyer, 1987). Purposes of the Study The purposes of the study were: 1. To present the rationale of the BCT project. 2. To describe an example of a BCT activity and the responses to it in the classroom. 3. To report the results of a pilot study that examined the feasibility of implementing some BCT activities. Design and Procedures Guidelines The following guidelines have been adopted by the BCT project: 1. Critical thinking activities will constitute an integral component of the regular curriculum. No attempt is made to develop a new biology curriculum. 2. In order to enhance transfer, the same skill should be applied in many occasions and in a variety of contexts. 3. The activity will include metacognitive discussions of the particular reasoning skills and how they were used. 4. The time devoted to the activity should be reasonably School Science and Mathematics