چكيده
Using critical thinking in textbooks is important. When a critical thinking approach is applied to education, it helps the students' brains function better and understand differently. Critical thinking help students recognize and take the risk during taking action and helps learners to think independently, prove perspectives and accuracy of information or claim and use diffrent criteria during decision making and search more, finding the evidence before accepting an idea (Abrami et al,2008). The purpose of this study was to investigate the incorporation of elements of critical thinking in a textbook entitled Methodology in Language Teaching used at Payame Noor University. The study specifically aimed to discover which elements of critical thinking skills are included in the textbook and to what extent. To do so, a checklist was developed and validated based on the Facione (2011) and Paul-Elder (2001) critical thinking models. Next, Two trained ratters used the checklist to discover elements of critical thinking in the textbook. In this study both qualitative and quantitative content analysis methods were used to analyze the collected data. After analyzing the data, the percentage and frequency of each of the elements of critical thinking used in the textbook were reported. The results indicated that from among the fifteen critical thinking elements (e.g. clarity, accuracy, analysis, evaluation, precision, relevance, depth, explanation, interpretation, inference, breath, self-regulation, logic, significance, and fairness) used in the validated checklist to evaluate the textbook, all of the fifteen critical thinking skills were used and the most frequent CTS were ’explanation’ ’relevance’, and ’precision‘. In contrast, ‘accuracy’‘ and ‘evaluation‘ have a lower frequency. The authors of the textbook paid less attention to using the other critical thinking elements in the textbook.
Therefore, we can conclude that the textbook includes all of the critical thinking skills based on the checklist which we developed to evaluate the textbook but, the authors of textbook used some of the critical thinking skills such as self-regulation, significance, clarity, depth, lower than other critical thinking skills.
