Students’ Critical Thinking And Writing Ability Reflected On Online Discussion Forum

The utilization of gadgets can influence student’s participation on teaching and learning process. To that aim, online discussion forum is often used allowing students to engage in critical contestation of ideas. Theoritically, criticism is the process of responding to and evaluating ideas, argument, and style of others. In light of learning process especially in the tertiary level, Dasbender (2011:38) asserts that students often come across critical thinking and analysis as requirements for assignments in writing and upper-level courses. In this study, graduate students’ comments on their discussion are analyzed. The analysis stems from the fact that such comments imply students’ ability to think critically on the aspects of inference, deduction, recognition of assumption, interpretation, and evaluation of arguments. The comments show how well students can argumentatively write their ideas based on the aspects of clarity, logicality, flexibility and relevancy. The data are collected from online discussion forum of Advanced Sociolinguistics subject in UNP. From the analysis, it is known that students have been able to give their interpretation related to the topic being discussed. The students still need to enhance their reading in order to be able to share ideas in case of deduction and inference because these two terms require students deep understanding on certain topic based on credible theories. Besides, student’s comments have reflected four indicators of argumentative writing overal.