Conceptualizing Critical Thinking in Hong Kong: The Decoupling of Policy and Practice in the New Senior Secondary Curriculum Reform

<a href="https://embed.stanford.edu/iframe/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpurl.stanford.edu%2Fmj653gk3762" class="su-underline">Show Content</a>

Abstract/Contents

Abstract: Critical thinking is a term increasingly incorporated into educational policy around the world as a primary curriculum reform objective. Despite shifts in policy, however, often the mechanisms for ensuring the implementation of policy in practice are decoupled. Hong Kong is among one of the many educational systems that has recently undergone a drastic curriculum reform in which critical thinking has been defined as a key skill. This paper investigates how critical thinking is conceptualized on different levels of curriculum – from intended to resourced to implemented – in the secondary school subject, Liberal Studies, against the backdrop of the New Senior Secondary Curriculum (NSSC) reform. Employing textual analyses and interviews, I investigate whether and why gaps exist in the conceptualization of critical thinking at these three curricular levels in order to understand the process of decoupling from policy to practice. The findings of the study suggest that critical thinking is conceptualized fairly nebulously from policy to practice, leading to decoupling between the two. These findings highlight a need for Hong Kong educational authorities to provide a clearer definition of critical thinking, as well as stronger programmatic support for teachers, in order to best sustain alignment in this curriculum reform.

Type of resource	text
Date created	July 2015

Author	Chow, Eunice

Subject	critical thinking education
Subject	Liberal Studies
Subject	New Senior Secondary Curriculum
Subject	curriculum reform
Subject	neo-institutionalism
Subject	decoupling
Subject	Hong Kong
Subject	Stanford Graduate School of Education International Education Policy Analysis
Genre	Thesis

Related item	Title Stanford Graduate School of Education International Comparative Education
Location	https://purl.stanford.edu/mj653gk3762

Use and reproduction: User agrees that, where applicable, content will not be used to identify or to otherwise infringe the privacy or confidentiality rights of individuals. Content distributed via the Stanford Digital Repository may be subject to additional license and use restrictions applied by the depositor.
License: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).

Graduate School of Education International Comparative Education Master's Monographs

Loading usage metrics...