Developing Students’ Critical Thinking in Essay Writing

Abstract

Critical thinking is the ability to think critically, clearly, and logically in order to gather, interpret, and evaluate information. One of the types of essays to develop students’ critical thinking is comparison and contrast essay. In comparison and contrast essay, students have to figure out what criteria they want to focus on in comparing (similarities) and contrasting (differences) of two things or items. By promoting students’ critical thinking in comparison and contrast essay, it can be assumed that students can strengthen their memories, develop higher-order thinking skills, increase their comprehension, and enhance their writing in the content areas. Therefore, this present paper aims at providing theoretical views on the issues of critical thinking in writing class as well as offering lecturer’s creative and innovative ways in lecturing comparison and contrast essay. The participants of this research were from one class consisting of 25 college students at Indraprasta PGRI University, semester VI, academic year 2015/2016. The methodology was a descriptive qualitative. The research findings showed that students were good at organization (introduction, body, and conclusion), content (logical development of ideas), and vocabulary (style and quality of expression); however, they were still poor at punctuation, spelling, mechanics and grammar.