Impacto del desarrollo de habilidades de pensamiento crítico en la comprensión lectora de estudiantes de enseñanza básica

Zusammenfassung

The research aimed to determine, through a quasi-experimental study, the overall and differential effects of a programmatic experience in the development of critical thinking skills on reading comprehension levels of performance of 57 eight-graded elementary school students from a semi-subsidised school located in Marga Marga, Valparaíso region. The levels of performance were obtained through the application of the CL-PT reading comprehension test. To determine the level of significance of the results, obtained by the subjects in the experimental group after the intervention and to compare these results with those achieved by 53 students in the control group, the Wilcoxon test was used. The intervention program was designed based on the theoretical and practical postulates of authors such as Mathew Lipman, Richard Paul and Linda Elder, who give to the Socratic questioning a fundamental role in the evaluation and analysis of the reasoning that takes place in the reading comprehension process. The study unveils that only the experimental group shows a positive and statistically significant change in the overall level of reading comprehension performance. This change, in turn, permeates the improvement in the level of performance exhibited by the students in six of the seven areas evaluated in the CL-PT test. Consequently, the correlations and cause-effect relationships between critical thinking, and reading comprehension stated both in the literature and in the research reviewed in this study are ratified.