Enhancing social studies students’ critical thinking through blogcast and Socratic questioning: a Singapore case study

Abstract

This paper reports the findings of a case study examining whether the use of a blogcast with a Socratic questioning approach improved secondary school students' critical thinking in their evaluation of controversial social studies issues. A pre-test and post-test one-group design was implemented to ascertain the difference in participants' critical thinking before and after the approach. The results were favourable showing a statistically significant improvement of medium effect size in students' critical thinking. In addition, a majority of the students enjoyed the blogcast experience. Given the merits of this research, a longitudinal study exploring the effect of blogcast with Socratic questioning on critical thinking in social studies using a larger sample or modified to incorporate other subject matters is worth exploring.