Strategies for Cultivating Students’ Critical Thinking Based on the Problem Continuum

Abstract

Critical thinking is one of the core components of “learning and innovation skills” in the 21st-century learning framework and is of great significance to students’ development. At present, the cultivation of critical thinking in secondary school classrooms still suffers from problems such as superficial question design, insufficient classroom follow-up questioning and argumentation, and an overemphasis on outcomes in teaching evaluation. The problem continuum theory provides theoretical guidance for addressing these problems. By adhering to the principles of contextualization, gradual progression, and student agency, teachers can adopt strategies such as delving deeply into teaching texts to identify resources for critical thinking, analyzing instructional content to design progressively sequenced problem sets, optimizing evaluation methods to attend to the entire process of thinking development, and optimizing teacher–student interaction to create an open and inclusive dialogic classroom, thereby promoting the cultivation of students’ critical thinking.