A Teaching Method to Develop a Critical Thinking of the Students of the General Education Ecclesiastical School

Problem statement: The objectives of the research were to study (1) the teaching method to develop a critical thinking of the students of the General Education Ecclesiastical School, (2) the effectiveness of the teaching method to develop a critical thinking of the students of the General Education Ecclesiastical School. Approach: The populations were the students of 35 general education ecclesiastical schools in the provinces of Ubon Ratchathani, Yasothon and Amnat Charoen. The samples of 43 students of Kittiyanwittaya were selected by a purposive sampling. The research instruments were a lesson plan on Buddhist Doctrine, a format to assess an ability of a critical thinking and a test on an achievement. Statistics used was t-test. Learning activity consisted of five components: (1) ability to define the problems, (2) ability to choose an information relevant to the problems, (3) ability to be aware of the preliminary agreement, (4) ability to determine and choose hypothesis and (5) ability to conclude reasonably. Results: As for the effectiveness of the teaching method in study, there were two parts considered: (1) the effectiveness of the teaching method to develop a critical thinking of the students was found at 81.0/84.0, which was in conformity with the 80/80 criterion; (2) as regards achievement of the teaching and learning based on the teaching method under study, it was found that the achievement after using of the method was higher with a statistical significance of 0.01. Conclusion: The significance of the research is the effectiveness of the teaching method to develop a critical thinking of the students. The teaching method had the effectiveness at 81.0/84.0. and the achievement of the teaching after used the teaching method the average score was equivalent 42.09. The learning achievement was statically higher than that before using the method at 0.01 level of significance.