Phrase Features in Essay Report Sentences for Developing Critical Thinking Ability in a Fully Online Course

Abstract

Sentences in student's essay reports were analysed to examine the feasibility of evaluating ability of critical thinking disposition in order to develop this ability during a fully online course in a university class. Features of essay reports, dependency of terms, and the representation of selected terms between levels of critical thinking disposition which were measured using a questionnaire were compared. The results show that the frequency of dependencies reflects the level of factor scores of critical thinking disposition and that multi-dimensional scales of these frequencies can illustrate the relationships between dependencies and levels of ability. Also, senses which contained affirmative or negative contents are evaluated using a corpus of affirmative and negative words used in essay reports. These frequencies are influenced by the level of ability as well.