Infusing Parts-whole Relationship Critical Thinking Skill into Basic Computer Science Education

Improving the quality of student thinking should be given a high priority in any educational system as good thinking is essential in meeting the challenges of living in a rapidly changing and technologically oriented world. Research on thinking convinced that skillful thinking process can be inculcated in students if thinking skills are taught explicitly and are integrated into content instruction. Basic critical thinking skills like determining parts-whole relationships, comparing and contrasting, classification, sequencing, finding reasons, and decision making play an important role in professional lives. These skills can be either imparted to the computer science students by offering special course(s) on critical thinking or can be infused into the course contents. Using the later approach, one model lesson on a topic from a basic computer science course proposed in CC2001 [1] as “Introduction to Computer Science” is presented in this paper. It is very natural to embed the critical thinking skills like determining parts-whole relationship into the course contents. The approach will enhance both the understanding of the computer science concepts as well as the critical thinking skills of the students.