Chapter 4 An Empirical Study of the Effectiveness

67C.-M. Lam, Childhood, Philosophy and Open Society, Education in the Asia-Pacifi c Region: Issues, Concerns and Prospects 22, DOI 10.1007/978-981-4451-06-2_4, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013

4.1 Introduction

This chapter constitutes the second part of the present book’s argument. Following on from Chap. 3 , which has developed a Popperian theory and practice of education and provided a theoretical justi fi cation for Lipman’s Philosophy for Children pro-gramme as a way of achieving Popper’s educational ideal, it aims to carry out a systematic and empirical assessment of the effectiveness of the programme in promoting critical thinking of a group of Secondary 1 students in Hong Kong, China. Its signi fi cance lies in the fact that although Lipman’s Philosophy for Children pro-gramme has proved successful in many parts of the world, the discussion of whether this programme can foster children’s critical thinking is rare if not non-existent at all in Hong Kong – arguably a society with Confucian heritage culture.

4.1.1 Statement of the Problem

Living in modern society where rapid changes make it dif fi cult to predict what factual knowledge will be required in the future, students have a more pressing need to acquire the skills that will give them the greatest control over their lives and learn-ing than to absorb an enormous amount of information in schools. A key component of such skills is those of critical thinking. Indeed, in local curriculum guides, there is evidence of a growing emphasis on the importance of developing critical thinking in education. For example, from 2001–2002 to 2005–2006, priority was given to the development of critical thinking skills, creativity, and communication skills among the nine generic skills in that “they are crucial for helping students to appreciate the pleasure of learning to learn and to reduce their dependency on transmission of knowledge” (Curriculum Development Council, 2001 , p. v).

One of the most successful attempts to establish a coherent curriculum for teaching critical thinking is the Philosophy for Children (commonly known as P4C)

Chapter 4 An Empirical Study of the Effectiveness of Lipman’s Philosophy for Children Programme on Promoting Children’s Critical Thinking in Hong Kong, China

http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-981-4451-06-2_3

68 4 An Empirical Study of the Effectiveness of Lipman’s Philosophy…

programme. Devised by Matthew Lipman and his colleagues at the Montclair State University, this programme aims to provide a curriculum for philosophical inquiry for children from nursery to college level and is divided into a number of sub-programmes – each containing a children’s novel and a teacher’s manual. More speci fi cally, resembling adult-level philosophy, P4C begins with the reading and discussion of texts: children fi rst read novels in which they make judgements about what is meaningful and important, and then discuss their ideas and the ideas of their classmates. Teachers are trained to draw appropriate questions from instruction manuals in order to help identify further the problematic nature of the ill-formed or ambiguous concepts under discussion (Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children [IAPC], 1995 ) .

Numerous studies have indicated that the P4C programme can make a difference to various aspects of a student’s academic performance. According to Lipman, Sharp, and Oscanyan ( 1980 ) , for instance, P4C can produce a positive effect on students’ performance in reading, mathematics, and reasoning. Their fi ndings are echoed by Fisher ( 1998 ) who, on the basis of a wide-ranging review of research projects on P4C, claims that students, after taking P4C lessons, become more ready to ask questions, to challenge others’ assertions, and to explain their own ideas; gain insight into the need to subject what they see and hear to critical inquiry; and can be expected to achieve higher test scores for verbal and mathematical reasoning.

This chapter reports a study of Lipman’s P4C programme. The purpose of the study was to investigate the effectiveness of Lipman’s P4C programme on promot-ing critical thinking of Secondary 1 students in Hong Kong. The study used the sub-programme that contains the novel titled Harry Stottlemeier ’ s Discovery (Lipman, 1982 ) and the teacher’s manual titled Philosophical Inquiry: An Instructional Manual to Accompany Harry Stottlemeier ’ s Discovery (Lipman, Sharp, & Oscanyan, 1984 ) . Aimed speci fi cally at Grades 5 and 6 students, this sub-programme lays great stress on the development of skills in both formal rea-soning (e.g. immediate inference and categorical syllogism) and informal reasoning (e.g. fallacy detection and inductive reasoning) – the putative techniques of critical thinking. More precisely, following Lipman ( 2003 ) , critical thinking was de fi ned as thinking that facilitates good judgement in that it relies on criteria, like precision, consistency, and relevance; shows sensitivity to context, involving recognition of exceptional circumstances, special limitations, and overall con fi gurations; and engages in self-corrective practice, which includes accepting the fallibility of its own procedures, questioning them, and rectifying what is at fault in them.

4.1.2 Review of Related Literature

4.1.2.1 Doing Philosophy with Children

Despite the extensive research evidence demonstrating the effectiveness of the P4C programme, the issue of whether children are too young to do philosophy surfaces

694.1 Introduction

constantly in educational debates since the start of the P4C movement. The importance of this question consists in the fact that “there are those who hold that anyone can do philosophy and others who suggest that only experts can do it, and this issue tends to prevent large numbers of teachers from engaging with it in their class-rooms” (Long, 2005 , p. 599). Indeed, many philosophers are openly sceptical about the capability of children to philosophize. Two notable examples are Richard Kitchener and John White: in agreement with Kitchener ( 1990 ) who claims that children are incapable of engaging in the higher-order kind of thinking central to doing philosophy, White ( 2005 ) expresses grave doubts as to whether they can map out philosophical concepts from a higher-order perspective. So, can children do philosophy?

4.1.2.2 Arguments for the Claim That Children Can Philosophize

Philosophical Disposition

There are three main arguments for the claim that children can philosophize. The fi rst argument is that children have an innate disposition to do philosophy: rather than take the perplexities emerging from their daily experience for granted, they have a natural tendency to wonder why things are the way they are. Ranging from a hair growing on their skin to a star twinkling in the sky, children wonder at everything about themselves and the world. This sense of wonder, no matter how naïve it appears in children, has long been regarded as vital to philosophy. As Plato ( 1953 ) puts it explicitly, “Wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder” (p. 251). The main reason why children have such a natural yet strong sense of wonder is that they do not have a fully formed frame of reference into which they can place their everyday experiences, making each of these experiences seem inexpli-cable and thus take on an enigmatic quality for them (Lipman et al., 1980 ) .

Admittedly, when confronted with the enigma of life, different children respond in different ways. While some children may be at their wits’ end, weeping to realize that there is no largest number (Toulmin, 1994 ) ; many of them often wrestle with the puzzling aspects of their experience through asking philosophical questions with the immediateness and seriousness that adults, whose ideas of what is given in experience seem inevitably infected with their theories, can only pretend to have (Matthews, 1994 ) . The philosophical questions children raise may be metaphysical, epistemological, logical, or ethical. And one characteristic of these questions is that their answers are essentially debatable in the sense that there is no agreement on what makes an adequate answer, and even no agreement on what makes an appro-priate procedure for seeking the answer.

Here it should be noted that although children have a disposition to ask philo-sophical questions, such questioning is not always explicit and solemn. On the one hand, sometimes children just ask themselves philosophical questions without telling anybody about it. But it is still possible to get a glimpse of covert questions of this sort through their overt behaviour: Norton ( 1994 ) , for example, argues that


children’s intuitive apprehension over the contingency of existence arising from their thought of the metaphysical question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” underlies “the highly exaggerated but entirely characteristic fear of sepa-ration which besets midchildhood” (p. 124). On the other hand, children usually follow their own bent when asking philosophical questions, which often take the form of “momentary entertainments soon forgotten, playful explorations of language, enticing attempts at generalizations, ‘fun things to think about’, and so on” (Gillespie, 1994 , p. 139). This in no way means that children are not serious about the question-ing, only that they may endeavour to deal with the philosophical dimensions of their experience in various ways.

Another noteworthy point is that it is important for teachers to help preserve children’s disposition to wonder why things are the way they are and thus their dis-position to look for meaning in life through philosophical re fl ection. The reason is that such disposition of children is likely to be extinguished gradually by the adults around them, who, having come to accept parts of life as perplexing without the tendency to wonder about them anymore, frequently set a bad example of unques-tioning acceptance on which children model their own conduct. To counteract this disturbing trend towards cessation of wondering, teachers should create a thought-provoking environment where children are stimulated to think for themselves about their personal experience, that is, to engage in real philosophical activity. In fact, evidence is accumulating that doing philosophy in the classroom is conducive to not only revealing but also reinforcing children’s disposition to philosophize. For instance, apart from the fi nding that a large majority of students enjoyed doing philosophy in the class, which indicates that they generally show an interest in, hence a bent for, philosophy, both Higa ( 1980 ) and Jackson ( 1993 ) found that a majority of students continued the philosophical discussions they started in the philosophy class with other classmates and adults outside the class sessions, which indicates that the disposition of students to philosophize can be preserved, even reinforced, so long as they are appropriately stimulated to do so in the classroom.

Philosophical Potentiality

The second argument for asserting children’s capacity for philosophy is that they have great potentiality to philosophize: even preschoolers possess a remarkable variety of latent intellectual abilities required for doing philosophy. However, the existence of such abilities is not well recognized by developmental psychologists until their adoption of new research methods to investigate children’s cognition in the past few decades. Today, with multifarious verbal and non-verbal experimental methods instead of those almost wholly verbal and observational methods used in early research, developmentalists fi nd infants and young children not as incompe-tent as they once thought. A striking example is that even 2-year-olds, who were once characterized by Piaget as essentially egocentric and thus as incapable of seeing things from the perspective of another person, turn out to be non-egocentric in the sense that “they realize that another person will not see an object they see if

714.1 Introduction

the person is blindfolded or is looking in a different direction” (Flavell, 1992 , p. 999). And this non-egocentricity – an ability to decentre and see a situation from another’s perspective – is obviously a prerequisite to the success of a philosophical discussion which is not simply a matter of being able to indulge in self-expression, but empha-sizes the importance of appreciating other people’s points of view and learning from each other.

Indeed, besides non-egocentricity, present-day developmentalists have identi fi ed in young children at least four distinct types of cognitive abilities that are vital to doing philosophy. First, according to Gopnik and Astington ( 1988 ) , children’s understanding of representational change, or ability to understand that there might be alternative representations of the same object and that their previous representa-tion differs from their present representation when they change their ideas about an object, seems to develop between ages three and fi ve. As this ability to understand representational change underpins children’s ability to learn from their mistakes, which requires that they know they were mistaken (through representing their past representations and contrasting them with their present representations) and are capable of recognizing the conditions that led them to mistakes, it is basically a precondition for self-correction. Yet, philosophical discussion in the classroom, as a form of inquiry, is a characteristically self-correcting practice that aims at enabling students to become self-correcting in their own thinking through their detection and correction of each other’s errors in reasoning (Lipman, 2003 ) .

Second, many studies have suggested that children early in life can apply appro-priately three fundamental causal-explanatory reasoning systems, viz. physical, biological, and psychological reasoning: for example, 3- and 4-year-olds under-stand that animals and plants but not inanimate objects can grow and recover (biological reasoning); that people but not rocks or dolls can think, remember, and feel happy (psychological reasoning); and that thoughts are mental and non-material while such physical entities as dogs and balls are tangible and material (physical reasoning) (Wellman, Hickling, & Schult, 2000 ) . Children’s capability of using these reasoning systems to make causal explanations about physical, biological, and psychological phenomena is indispensable to philosophical inquiry. The reason is that philosophy, as a discipline for seeking meaning, is particularly concerned with making distinctions and connections, of which those between causes and effects are a key component.

Third, as to children’s understanding of moral issues, Bussey ( 1992 ) argues that it can be acquired as early as they are at preschool age on the basis of his research into children’s conceptual and moral understanding of lying. More speci fi cally, he found that even preschoolers could differentiate between lies and truthful statements about misdeeds, and judge lies as more morally reprehensible than not only truthful state-ments but also misdeeds themselves. Such ability of children to show a basic under-standing of moral issues and to form an independent judgement about them is essential to doing philosophy, because, despite its aim of encouraging students to appreciate the importance of reaching sound moral judgements, philosophy in the classroom is con-cerned “not to inculcate substantive moral rules, or alleged moral principles, but to acquaint the student with the practice of moral inquiry” (Lipman et al., 1980 , p. 66).


Fourth, many researches have demonstrated that metacognition, which is generally understood as referring to metacognitive knowledge (i.e. knowledge about cognitive processes, tasks, and strategies) as well as to metacognitive monitoring and self-regulation (i.e. management of cognitive activities during problem solving) (Flavell, Miller, & Miller, 2002 ) , develops quite early in children. For example, four- to fi ve-year-olds have been shown to be capable of mastering the fundamental semantic features of mental verbs like think , know , guess , and forget (Sodian, 2005 ) , as well as monitoring and evaluating their own problem-solving behaviour (Robson, 2006 ) . This metacognitive ability of children to bring the process of thinking to a conscious level and thus to think about thinking is central to philosophical inquiry in that philosophy, as a discipline for improving thinking and reasoning, seeks to examine the nature of thinking – especially the beliefs, values, attitudes, and criteria underlying it.

It is no coincidence that the evolution of the aforementioned cognitive abilities that are vital to doing philosophy – i.e. non-egocentricity, understanding of repre-sentational change, application of causal-explanatory reasoning systems, under-standing of moral issues, and metacognition – occurs at the beginning of the preschool years as children acquire language. In fact, the development of language skills in preschoolers plays a crucial role in such evolution. This can be illustrated by the fi ndings that early conversations between child and mother, as a process in which the mother scaffolds the child’s learning through language, can support the child’s acquisition of ability to understand the feeling states of others and to take the other’s perspective (Bruner & Haste, 1987 ) , and that young children’s comprehen-sion of representational change and development of metacognition depend greatly on speci fi c language skills, particularly their ability to decode, memorize, and com-prehend sentences (Schneider, Lockl, & Fernandez, 2005 ) . Moreover, Corrigan and Denton ( 1996 ) suggest that language is indispensable to children’s acquisition and expression of causal understanding in such areas as the different types of events expressed by different types of verbs; and Bhatia ( 2000 ) argues that it is through participation in language-based communicative practices like dialogue, conversa-tion, and narrative that children begin to grasp moral meanings. In other words, the potentiality of young children to philosophize goes hand in hand with their remarkable language development during the preschool years.

To see further how children’s command of language re fl ects their competence in doing philosophy, it is advisable to conceive philosophy as what Wittgenstein ( 1974a ) terms a language-game, or a linguistic practice governed by certain rules and conven-tions, in which they can take part on many levels. According to Kennedy ( 1999 ) , since the moves of the language-game of philosophy, such as giving examples/counterexamples, evaluating categorical statements, and applying analogical reasoning, are implicit in the syntactic and semantic structures of language and thus always implicit among those who use language, “to the extent that children share a linguistic universe with adults, they share the capacity for at least some of the critical moves of philosophical dialogue, on some level” (p. 351). Indeed, apart from the linguistic universe , children share the basic repertoire of reasoning skills with adults: although an adult possesses enormously greater experience than a child

734.1 Introduction

does and therefore may be better able to cope with complicated problems through structuring his or her activity as a series of reasoning steps, their sets of elementary reasoning equipment are fundamentally similar (Lipman, 1991 ) . Accordingly, it seems unreasonable to deny that children are adequately equipped for philosophy to a certain extent.

Philosophical Capability

The third argument for asserting children’s capacity for philosophy is that they have proven capability to philosophize: a body of anecdotal and empirical evidence dem-onstrates that they can do philosophy both by themselves and with others . Here, before considering the concrete evidence, it is important to attend to two shrewd observations made by Jaspers ( 1994 ) – an existentialist philosopher who sees the task of philosophy as consisting primarily in assisting individuals with their own self-discovery rather than in discovering theoretical truths – on the nature of phi-losophy. First, philosophy should be accessible to all, including children, because “our own humanity, our own destiny, our own experience strike us as a suf fi cient basis for philosophical opinions” (ibid., p. 38). Second, philosophy is not something that someone can somehow give to another, but a personal thing that one must do for oneself. The accuracy of these philosophical observations is attested by fi rst-hand experiences of many other philosophers, one intriguing example of which comes from Tolstoy ( 1994 ) . In describing his fi rst encounter with philosophical ideas during his boyhood, Tolstoy demonstrates not only that children’s exploration of philosophy can be an individual, continuous, and wonderful adventure, but also that the impact of philosophical thought on children can be so profound that they apply it to life. As regards the latter, Tolstoy once thought that one should seize every opportunity to enjoy life, considering death might befall anybody at any moment. Under the in fl uence of this thought, he had really done some enjoyable things. As he puts it, “for three days, …, I neglected my lessons, and did nothing but lie [ sic ] on the bed, and enjoy [ sic ] myself by reading a romance and eating gingerbread with Kronoff mead, for which I spent the last money I had” (ibid., p. 26).

Apart from such individual philosophers’ childhood recollections as Tolstoy’s boyhood memories of his philosophical exploration, a mass of anecdotal evidence gathered by Matthews ( 1980 ) attests to the capability of children to philosophize by themselves . This can be illustrated by two amazing anecdotes about philosophical reasoning in young children. The fi rst one is as follows:

TIM (about six years), while busily engaged in licking a pot, asked, “ Papa , how can we be sure that everything is not a dream? ” [italics added] Somewhat abashed, Tim’s father said that he didn’t know and asked how Tim thought that we could tell? [ sic ] After a few more licks of the pot, Tim answered, “ Well , I don ’ t think everything is a dream ,’ cause in a dream people wouldn ’ t go around asking if it was a dream ” [italics added] (Ibid., p. 23)

Given that Tim’s problem is essentially the same as the dreaming doubt Descartes ( 1996 ) expresses in his Meditations on First Philosophy to raise the possibility that all our sensory experiences are dreams of a sort and thus incapable of providing an


absolutely fi rm foundation for knowledge, Tim has stated a signi fi cant philosophical, even epistemological, problem. While it is debatable whether Tim’s solution to his dreaming problem is a good one, it seems undeniable that his solution is at least a reasoned one. Tim’s reasoning, according to Matthews, is that “(1) If everything were a dream, people wouldn’t go around asking if it was a dream. (2) People do go around asking if it is a dream. Therefore: (3) Not everything is a dream” (ibid., p. 25). Undoubtedly, this argument is valid because it has the logical form of modus tollens . As for the second anecdote, it is here:

IAN (six years) found to his chagrin that the three children of his parents’ friends monopo-lized the television; they kept him from watching his favorite program. “Mother,” he asked in frustration, “ why is it better for three people to be sel fi sh than for one? ” [italics added] (Matthews, 1980 , p. 28)

Ian’s question suggests that he is probably well aware of utilitarianism as an ethical theory which holds that an act is morally right if and only if that act maximizes happiness, and thus of the utilitarian reasoning in this case that it is better for three people to be happy than for one. However, Ian seems to have thought that when three people gain what they want at the expense of another’s opportunity to gain what s/he wants, the three people may be regarded as sel fi sh. Accordingly, in a somewhat mischievous yet ingenious way, he reverses the utilitarian reasoning through substitution of sel fi shness for happiness in his query, presenting utilitarians with a philosophical paradox that “the very same situation that might be justi fi ed on the grounds that it maximizes happiness might also be condemned on the grounds that it maximizes sel fi shness” (ibid., p. 29).

With regard to the evidence demonstrating children’s capability to philosophize with others , it has long been reported extensively in empirical studies. For example, Matthews ( 1984 ) , while engaging 8- to 11-year-olds in discussing such philosophical issues as “Is the ship on which almost all the boards are new still the old ship?” and “Why is it better for three people to be sel fi sh than for one?”, found respectively that they were capable of maintaining a smooth fl ow of ideas with appropriate analogies and fascinating insights, and that they were deft at deriving simple ethical rules for resolving disputes from their real-life experiences and imaginary analogies. Echoing Matthews’ fi ndings, Costello ( 2000 ) testi fi ed to the capacity of his class of 6- to 7-year-old children to think, reason, and argue in a competent manner about the philosophical problem of personal identity; and Palermo ( 1995 ) af fi rmed that the 6- and 7-year-olds in her study were intent on philosophical investigations and able to “think logically, sustain a train of thought, imagine circumstances from points of view other than their own, make distinctions, provide evidence, and wonder imagi-natively about phenomena outside their immediate perceptions” (p. 249). Moreover, based on careful observation of his third- and fourth-graders discussing moral and ethical issues, C. Evans ( 1994 ) identi fi ed three philosophically important features that can justify calling their discussions philosophical, viz. philosophical commit-ments, philosophical skills, and philosophical issues. First, philosophical commit-ments refer to certain principles or attitudes necessary to make a philosophical discussion go, such as impartiality (i.e. discussants should not give undue weight to any particular person or interest unless they have relevant reasons to do so), and

754.1 Introduction

consistency (i.e. discussants should strive to make their thoughts and statements at one time compatible with those at other times). Second, philosophical skills refer to the knack necessary for the success of a philosophical – hence rational and critical – inquiry, such as distinguishing an exposition from an argument, recognizing common fallacies, and understanding how language can be used to cause distortion or distraction. Third, philosophical issues refer to substantive philosophical problems or topics raised by discussants themselves during the course of their discussion. As it can be argued that these three features are vital prerequisites for philosophical inquiry at any level, from the most sophisticated to the most elementary, there seems no reason to deny children’s capacity for philosophizing with others if their discus-sion involves exactly such kinds of commitments, skills, and issues required of practising philosophers.

4.1.2.3 Arguments Against the Claim That Children Can Philosophize

Persuasive as the preceding arguments appear, many philosophers still dispute the claim that children can philosophize. A typical example of such sceptics is Richard Kitchener. Viewing philosophy as a way of life , Kitchener ( 1990 ) characterizes philosophy as including the following: pondering on such philosophical issues as determinism versus free will; putting forward philosophical questions and being puzzled by things usually taken for granted; assimilating the historical tradition of philosophy through reading the great philosophers; constructing arguments in support of certain conclusions; joining in various kinds of conversations about philosophy; and being unable to stop philosophizing. However, Kitchener doubts seriously whether children share this way of life characteristic of professional philosophers, for he holds that children, unlike adults, don’t make philosophy an essential part of their lives with regard to learning philosophy.

When confronted with the concrete evidence given by P4C advocates, Kitchener ( 1990 ) claims bluntly that they demonstrate at most the capability of children to do concrete philosophy when quoting instances of children discussing concrete philo-sophical issues, like the above-mentioned “Is the ship on which almost all the boards are new still the old ship?” and “Why is it better for three people to be sel fi sh than for one?”; and that children are incapable of doing abstract philosophy – the genuine philosophy he has in mind – since children cannot grasp the principle qua principle underlying the concrete issue, like the ontological principle of what constitutes identity over time underlying the former issue. Indeed, there is no lack of supporters of Kitchener’s claim about children’s incapacity for his so-called abstract philosophy. One of these supporters is Fox ( 2003 ) , who argues that children typically do not make systematic progress in truly philosophical thinking until much later, because it takes them many years to have a “clear understanding of general, abstract, second-order questions, unrelated to any particular time and place” (p. 37). Another one is White ( 2005 ) , who argues that children’s serious attempt to analyse concepts does not mean that they can acquire abstract philo-sophical understanding, because, with a view to merely fi nding out how to use the


concept, they lack the philosophical intention of “mapping it from a higher-order perspective … in the pursuit of larger theoretical enquiries” (p. 201).

Moreover, even if children can say the same thing as an abstract philosopher as shown in much anecdotal evidence, this will be deemed by Kitchener ( 1990 ) to simply demonstrate their capacity for philosophical one-liners which, on both epistemo-logical and methodological grounds, cannot constitute suf fi cient evidence for decid-ing whether they really manifest philosophical ability. What conclusive evidence entails, according to Kitchener, is more complete transcripts of “a critical dialogue in which children are questioned on a one-one basis about their comments, elaborate upon their views, and rationally defend them” (ibid., p. 426). Similar worries over citation of short anecdotes, or philosophical one-liners, as evidence of children’s ability to philosophize are expressed by Miller ( 1986 ) , who asserts that such evidence suffers from the fact that there is too much opportunity for subjective biases to creep in: it is easy for a sceptic to explain away the reported insights of children as a result of subtle prompting by, memory lapses of, or selective editing by, the teacher.

4.1.2.4 Meeting the Sceptics’ Challenges

There are at least three possible ways of countering such sceptics’ arguments as Kitchener’s ( 1990 ) against the claim that children can philosophize. First, according to Murris ( 2000 ) , Kitchener makes two mistakes simultaneously when demanding that children should lead a philosophical life characterized by professional philoso-phers in order to demonstrate their capacity for philosophy. On the one hand, Kitchener wrongly refers to an incommensurate group of adults, viz. trained and quali fi ed academic philosophers, in comparing the ability of children to do philosophy with that of adults, while the only fair comparison is between children and adult students who have just started doing philosophy. On the other, Kitchener wrongly reasons that since many professional philosophers do philosophy in a speci fi c way, children ought to do it in the same way: he not only commits a naturalistic fallacy, or derives a prescriptive statement from a descriptive statement, without further justi fi cation; but also ignores the fact that there are different philosophical ways of life, instead of only one ideal one, which hinge on factors like language, time, and place.

Second, leaving aside the fact that Kitchener has not produced a general theory himself for drawing the arbitrary distinction between concrete and abstract philoso-phy, his claim that children cannot do genuine philosophy due to their lack of capabil-ity for examining the general principles underlying particular cases, or doing abstract philosophy, is questionable. A major critic of such philosophical craving for generality is Wittgenstein ( 1969 ) , who asserts that it is an important source of philosophical confusion and thus a great hindrance to philosophical clarity. As he puts it,

The idea that in order to get clear about the meaning of a general term one had to fi nd the common element in all its applications has shackled philosophical investigation; for it has not only led to no result, but also made the philosopher dismiss as irrelevant the concrete cases, which alone could have helped him to understand the usage of the general term. (Ibid., pp. 19–20)

774.1 Introduction

Since philosophical confusion, according to Wittgenstein, arises only when a philosopher is misled into removing words from their natural settings in language games where they have a de fi nite purpose, i.e. showing a disregard for the natural function of words in concrete cases , the task of a philosopher is to dissolve rather than solve philosophical problems through examining how words are used in the particular context of everyday life. Following Wittgenstein, therefore, it is a mistake for Kitchener to demand from children an ability to grasp the essence of the concept of “identity” by fi nding an ontological principle of what constitutes identity over time. Instead, in order to “bring words back from their metaphysical to their every-day use” (Wittgenstein, 1974a , p. 48e), Kitchener should focus on how the word “identity” is actually used in everyday circumstances. Ironically enough, what children often do during their philosophical inquiries – i.e. making attempts to establish the meaning of words in ordinary language within the particular contexts of their everyday experience – ful fi ls exactly the requirements of Wittgenstein for doing genuine philosophy.

Third, admittedly, using short anecdotes as evidence of children’s capacity for philosophy, because of the problem of subjective biases, is not suf fi ciently convincing. However, the criterion of adequate evidence Kitchener adopts, viz. the ability of children to defend and elaborate on their views when questioned one-to-one about their comments, is not convincing either: emphasizing only whether children can sustain a one-to-one critical dialogue with a professional philosopher like him, Kitchener totally ignores the importance of collaboration between children – speci fi cally building on, shaping, and modifying each other’s ideas – in philosophi-cal inquiry, which helps them produce the insights that they cannot attain by individual effort. A more reasonable criterion, accordingly, should be the ability of children to form and sustain a community of philosophical inquiry, in which they are “capable of critically questioning each other and defending their points of view over a long period of time” (Murris, 2000 , p. 264). Moreover, to convince the scep-tics, on the one hand, substantial transcripts of taped discussions rather than short anecdotes should be offered as evidence so as to make it dif fi cult for them to attri-bute the philosophical remarks of children to subtle prompting by, memory lapses of, or selective editing by, the teacher; on the other, the transcripts should be exten-sively annotated so as to make it improbable for them to miss the philosophical content of the transcripts, since, as Miller ( 1986 ) points out, it is probable that “someone who does not quite know what to look for, and/or doesn’t want to see it, will not fi nd genuine philosophical insights in the children’s conversations without help” (p. 47).

Indeed, there is no lack of such convincing evidence in the literature on P4C. For example, based on a comprehensive and annotated transcript of a videotaped dialogue with 22 fi rst-graders, McCall ( 1989 ) showed that the young children were capable of not only talking and reasoning about the philosophical concepts pre-sented in the given text, but also generating many important philosophical issues (about the nature of persons) for discussion on their own. And it is the children’s latter capability that provides strong support for the claim that they are actually doing instead of simply discussing philosophy. In another study, on the evidence of


a detailed transcript of a dialogue with 23 ten-year-olds with her extensive commentaries, Murris ( 1992 ) demonstrated that the children were able to form and sustain a community of philosophical inquiry in which they displayed various skills and attitudes, including the cognitive (e.g. giving good reasons, asking good questions, building logically on contributions of others, and being aware that knowledge is always open to revision) and social (e.g. showing a willingness to subject the views of others to critical inquiry, to take one another’s ideas seriously by responding, to change their mind, and not to be defensive) ones. Besides, Murris found that the ideas of Charley – one of the 23 children – became richer and richer, philosophically, as a result of the constant cognitive challenge posed by the reason-ing of other children; hence the bene fi cial effect of collaboration between children on the philosophical development of individual ones.

4.1.3 Questions of the Study

Given that the question of whether children can do philosophy has not to my knowledge hitherto been the focus of local research, and thus that the discussion of whether Lipman’s P4C programme can promote children’s critical thinking is rare if not non-existent at all in Hong Kong, the present study is well warranted. In order to acquire a comprehensive understanding of the research problem, both quantita-tive and qualitative data were used as appropriate in the study reported in this chapter to address the following research questions:

1. What evidence is there of students’ ability to do philosophy? 2. What role does P4C play in developing students’ critical thinking? 3. How does the reasoning test performance of students who are taught P4C compare

with those who are not? 4. What are the contributing factors to the success of the P4C programme? 5. What is the attitude of students towards doing philosophy in the classroom?

4.1.4 Signi fi cance of the Study

The present study is signi fi cant in at least four ways. First, to my knowledge, the present study is the fi rst systematic investigation in Hong Kong of whether children can do philosophy in the sense that they can not only discuss and reason about the philosophical concepts presented in the P4C text but also generate philosophical issues for discussion themselves. It is also the fi rst study in Hong Kong that exam-ines the relationship between doing philosophy with children by means of Lipman’s P4C programme and developing their critical thinking. With the support of other relevant studies (e.g. Jenkins, 1986 ; Allen, 1988 ; Pálsson, 1996 ) conducted predominantly in Western countries on the P4C programme, the present research

794.1 Introduction

provides a richer understanding of its effectiveness on promoting critical thinking in children within a Chinese context. This is particularly important in that empirical studies on critical thinking are seriously inadequate in the Chinese context, while critical thinking education in the Chinese context may be dif fi cult due to the in fl uence of some traditional Chinese, not least Confucian, beliefs and values (Ku, 2008 ) . Within the context of secondary schools in Hong Kong, Mok ( 2007 ) found a similar lack of research into the teaching of critical thinking. Indeed, although this work is focused on Secondary 1 students of the same school, it is believed that the methodology employed and the results yielded may be applicable to examining the effectiveness of Lipman’s P4C programme at other school levels or in other schools.

Second, as the present study focuses primarily on exploring the impact of P4C on the development of critical thinking among a group of Hong Kong secondary students, it carries direct implications for local secondary teaching of critical think-ing in particular, which in turn would expand the research base in critical thinking education in general. Moreover, considering that effective evaluation involves gath-ering data “on a variety of measures and activities so as to allow the effects of the program every chance to be seen” (Baron, 1987 , p. 224), this study also contributes to the way in which students’ application of critical thinking during and after P4C lessons is detected. Several approaches, including discussion, writing, testing, and drawing, are used in the present study to evaluate comprehensively whether philo-sophical inquiries in the classroom can stimulate critical thinking in students.

Third, teachers, as frontline implementers and change agents of any educational reform, need to have knowledge of what works and what doesn’t in the P4C pro-gramme. The identi fi cation and explanation of various factors contributing to the success of the programme in this study can provide teachers with important insights into the practicalities of its implementation, especially the complex teacher-student and student-student interactions in the classroom. Such insights serve as a sound basis for teachers to plan more effective strategies for developing communities of philosophical inquiry in actual classrooms. After all, teachers are pragmatic people who are mostly interested in how to put theory into practice, or rather, to translate ideas in the book into actions in the classroom.

Fourth, so far as researchers are concerned, the exploration of students’ attitude towards doing philosophy in the classroom in the present study provides them with a helpful clue about students’ feeling of not only what they like or dislike in philoso-phy lessons but what positive or negative effects philosophy brings about on them. In fact, the feeling of students about doing philosophy, e.g. their feeling about whether it helps them correct their thinking or develop a habit of giving good reasons for their beliefs, partly re fl ects the extent to which they acquire certain critical thinking dispositions, e.g. seeking reasons or changing a position when the evidence is suf fi cient for doing so (Ennis, 1987 ) . This will produce valuable insights into the effectiveness of the P4C programme from the perspective of students; hence the wider implications for research and practice in P4C. Additionally, the question-naire developed in this study serves as a useful starting point for further investiga-tion into students’ attitude towards philosophy classes.


4.2 Method

4.2.1 Participants

The sample for this study was selected from the total population of 205 Secondary 1 students at a well-established secondary school in Hong Kong. The school was co-educational, non-religious, and using English as the medium of instruction. The population was all Chinese, consisted totally of Band 1 students (i.e. the top one-third of students in Hong Kong in terms of academic achievement), and came predominantly (i.e. more than 90 %) from middle- or working-class families as determined by parental occupation. Forty-two students volunteered for the study, from whom 28 students were randomly selected and randomly assigned to two groups of 14 each: the experimental group (10 boys and 4 girls) and the control group (9 boys and 5 girls). A small sample of two groups of 14 students was used in the present study, because much research has demonstrated that a group size of around 14 is ideal for discussion, providing a good range of viewpoints and ample opportunity to contribute (Fisher, 1998 ) . In view of the small sample size and exploratory nature of this study, a descriptive approach to the analysis of results was adopted. It was anticipated that the study would be rather underpowered for infer-ential statistical analysis, and thus that the fi ndings would be suggestive and would need to be con fi rmed by a larger-scale study.

4.2.2 Instruments

The following fi ve instruments were used to collect data pertinent to the research questions of this study.

4.2.2.1 New Jersey Test of Reasoning Skills

The New Jersey Test of Reasoning Skills (NJTRS) was developed by Virginia Shipman to evaluate Lipman’s P4C programme. It was designed to measure elementary reasoning skills in language without contamination from inert items that drew on recollection of content or non-linguistic skills (IAPC, 1987 ) . In the present study, this instrument was used to assess the reasoning ability of the exper-imental and control groups. The NJTRS comprised 50 multiple-choice items that represented 22 reasoning skill areas, including analogical reasoning, induc-tive reasoning, syllogistic reasoning, detecting underlying assumptions, dis-cerning causal relationships, identifying good reasons, and recognizing dubious authority. Each correct answer scored 1 point, giving a maximum possible score of 50. The NJTRS’s content validity, construct validity, and concurrent validity were respectively claimed by the publisher on the basis of its adequate sampling

814.2 Method

of elementary reasoning skills taxonomy, detailed research for test development, and satisfactory correlations with some standardized achievement tests like the New Jersey College Basic Skills Placement Test (ibid.). With regard to the NJTRS’s internal consistency reliability as measured by Cronbach’s coef fi cient alpha, it was not only reported by the publisher to be ranging from 0.84 in Grade 5 to 0.91 in Grade 7, but also found by the researcher to be 0.80 for a sample of Secondary 1 students in the same local school that was directly com-parable with the sample in this study (see Sect. 4.2.5 ), suggesting a consistently high reliability.

4.2.2.2 Student Questionnaire

The Student Questionnaire (SQ; see Appendix A ) was developed by the researcher in this study to examine the attitude of the experimental group towards doing phi-losophy in the classroom. It was piloted on the aforementioned comparable sample of Secondary 1 students before fi nalizing its format, contents, and scoring. In its fi nal form, the SQ consisted of two sections, A (SQA) and B (SQB). The SQA comprised 20 Likert-scale items that asked students to indicate whether they strongly agreed (SA), agreed (A), were uncertain (U), disagreed (D), or strongly disagreed (SD) about the statement in each item. The following point values were assigned to the positive statements, i.e. all but the statements 3, 4, 8, and 10: SA = 5, A = 4, U = 3, D = 2, SD = 1. An example of a positive statement is “Talking about philosophy is fun” (statement 1). A score of 5 or 4 on this item would indicate a positive attitude towards doing philosophy in the classroom. For the negative state-ments 3, 4, 8, and 10, the point values were reversed – i.e. SA = 1, A = 2, U = 3, D = 4, and SD = 5 – so that a high total score across all items on the SQA would be indicative of an overall positive attitude. As regards the SQB, it comprised two free-response items that gave students the opportunity to construct and explain their own responses. The content validity of the SQ as a whole was established through review of relevant literature and consultation with P4C experts. So far as the SQA was concerned, its internal consistency reliability as measured by Cronbach’s coef fi cient alpha was found to be 0.74 for the present sample, indicat-ing a reasonably high reliability.

4.2.2.3 Video Recording

All P4C lessons were videotaped to record the complex interactions among students and the researcher during philosophical discussions in the classroom. The video recordings thus obtained allowed the researcher repeated viewing for in-depth anal-ysis of both visual and verbal data. Speci fi cally, these video recordings were used in the present study to fi nd out whether children could do philosophy, to examine the role played by P4C in developing children’s critical thinking, and to identify the contributing factors to the success of the P4C programme.

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4.2.2.4 Cognitive Behaviour Checklist

The Cognitive Behaviour Checklist (CBC) was designed by the IAPC to “evaluate possible changes in teacher attitudes toward students’ cognitive potentials” (Lipman, 2003 , p. 223). It consisted of 17 items that described three types of cognitive behav-iours students might display in dialogical settings, viz. inquiry behaviours (items 1–6: “Asks relevant questions” [item 1], “Avoids sweeping generalizations” [item 2], “Asks that claims be supported by evidence” [item 3], “Develops explanatory hypotheses” [item 4], “Recognizes differences of context” [item 5], and “Readily builds on the ideas of others” [item 6]), open-minded behaviours (items 7–9: “Accepts reasonable criticisms” [item 7], “Welcomes hearing ‘the other side of the case’” [item 8], and “Respects others and their rights” [item 9]), and reasoning behaviours (items 10–17: “Offers appropriate analogies” [item 10], “Seeks to clarify ill-de fi ned concepts” [item 11], “Makes relevant distinctions and connections” [item 12], “Supports opinions with convincing reasons” [item 13], “Provides examples and counter-examples” [item 14], “Seeks to uncover underlying assumptions” [item 15], “Draws suitable inferences” [item 16], and “Makes balanced evaluative judg-ments” [item 17]). Since the 17 behavioural traits included in the Checklist were highly characteristic of the putative critical thinking abilities and dispositions (Ennis, 1987 ) , the CBC was utilized as an instrument in this study to examine whether, and to what degree, the cognitive behaviours displayed by the experimental group during philosophical discussions were characteristic of critical thinking.

4.2.2.5 My Thinking Log

The My Thinking Log (MTL; see Appendix B ) was designed by the researcher primarily as a follow-up to P4C lessons for students to re fl ect on the philosophical discussion through logging their thinking. It was piloted, like the SQ, on the afore-mentioned comparable sample of local Secondary 1 students before fi nalizing its format and contents. In its fi nal form, the MTL was constructed with fi ve “lead-ins” that were intended to draw students into visual representation of thoughts (“A picture of my idea looks like …”) and such critical thinking processes as decision making (“A criticism I have is that …, because …”), problem solving (“I conclude that …” and “A question I have is …”), and evaluation (“How do you think you did? Why?”) (Fogarty, 1991 ) . Given its key role in revealing students’ thoughts in both verbal and visual ways, the MTL was also used in the present study as an instrument to explore whether its application could contribute to the success of the P4C programme and to the development of their critical thinking.

4.2.3 Design

Building on the strengths of both quantitative data (i.e. providing for generalizability) and qualitative data (i.e. offering contextual information), a mixed method design

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834.2 Method

was adopted to assess both the outcome (quantitative) and process (qualitative) of the present study (Creswell, 2002 ) . More precisely, it was a triangulation mixed method design in which both the quantitative data (including numeric scores from the NJTRS, SQA, and CBC) and qualitative data (including text data transcribed from the SQB and video recordings, text data optically scanned from the MTL, and image data from the pictures in the MTL) were collected simultaneously and given equal priority. The results from the analysis of both quantitative and qualitative data were directly compared, or triangulated, to determine whether the two databases supported or contradicted each other.

With regard to the collection of the quantitative data from the NJTRS for evaluating the effectiveness of Lipman’s P4C programme on enhancing children’s reasoning ability, a true experimental design, called the pretest-posttest control group design, was adopted in this study to ensure its internal validity (i.e. that the results obtained were due only to the P4C programme) and external validity (i.e. that the results obtained were generalizable to children or contexts beyond the experimental setting) (Gay & Airasian, 2000 ) . More speci fi cally, both the experi-mental and control groups, each formed by random assignment, were pretested using the NJTRS 11 days before the start of the study. It was followed by the experi-mental group receiving the P4C lessons and the control group receiving traditional English lessons. At the end of the study, both groups were posttested using the same instrument, and their posttest scores, together with pretest scores, were compared to determine the effectiveness of the P4C programme. The strength of this experi-mental design lay in the fact that “the combination of random assignment and the presence of a pretest and a control group serve to control for all sources of internal invalidity” (ibid., p. 392). Indeed, after a comprehensive review of the P4C researches done in the past few decades, García-Moriyón, Rebollo, and Colom ( 2005 ) highly recommended it as “the most reliable and least biased design” (p. 21) for assessing the effectiveness of the P4C programme. So far as threats to external validity were concerned, three potential ones were identi fi ed in this study, yet they were mini-mized in the following ways: while the novelty effect and pretest-treatment interac-tion were reduced by conducting the study over a fairly long period of 5 months (the latter was further diminished by the nonreactive nature of the pretest on reasoning skills), the Hawthorne effect was counteracted by developing a placebo approach in which both the experimental and control groups appeared to be treated the same.

4.2.4 Procedure

4.2.4.1 Actions for Treatment Groups

A school circular was sent to the parents of Secondary 1 students of the local school on 30 September 2004 to invite their children to sign up for a reading course. Out of 42 students who accepted the invitation, 28 of them were randomly selected and randomly assigned to the experimental and control groups of 14 each. While the P4C lessons were offered to the experimental group only during the experiment


(i.e. from 18 October 2004 to 17 March 2005), the NJTRS was administered to both the experimental and control groups 11 days before the start of the experiment (i.e. on 7 October 2004). As for the latter pretest, an English-Chinese glossary was provided for students to help them understand the questions in it.

The researcher, who had taught at the school for 16 years and attended a 10-day training workshop for teachers organized by the IAPC in 2003, taught the experi-mental group P4C by means of a philosophical novel entitled Harry Stottlemeier ’ s Discovery (Lipman, 1982 ) , an instructional manual accompanying the novel (Lipman et al., 1984 ) , together with the MTL as a follow-up instrument. The P4C lessons, each taking 90 min (i.e. from 4:00 to 5:30 p.m.), were taught twice a week for 16 weeks and all of them, totalling 32 lessons, were videotaped with a tripod-mounted camcorder in a distant corner of the classroom. A typical P4C session operated as follows: after reading a certain chapter of the novel – with the help of an English-Chinese glossary provided by the researcher – by themselves at home, students, who were allowed to speak in Cantonese during the session, fi rst took turns to share with the others what they found interesting or puzzling about its content in the form of questions, and then decided on a question that was agreeable to the majority for detailed inquiry in a whole-group discussion. As part of the community of inquiry, the teacher played a crucial role in facilitating the discussion, or rather, leading the group “through positive intervention in a philosophical direc-tion with the ultimate aim of some progress towards truth” (Fisher, 1998 , p. 178), using discussion plans and exercises in the instructional manual to extend philo-sophical ideas and reasoning skills related to the novel. After the discussion, students were required to fi nish the MTL at home as soon as possible and to submit it to the teacher in the next P4C session, in that the follow-up instrument could help them review the progress of the philosophical inquiry and the mode of their own thought. As regards the videotaped discussions, apart from being utilized to identify the contributing factors to the success of the P4C programme through repeated viewing by the researcher, a selected segment of them was transcribed, translated, and analysed in two different ways. First, the philosophical content of the transcript was annotated and used as evidence to demonstrate that students could philoso-phize. Second, the CBC was used to identify and quantify the students’ cognitive behaviour characteristic of critical thinking in the transcript.

Students in the control group were taught by a female English teacher at the same school, whose teaching experience was comparable with that of the researcher. To minimize treatment diffusion, by tacit agreement, the English teacher did not teach any topics related to philosophy, logic, or reasoning. Instead, she taught the control group English by using traditional methods, and engaged students in such class-room activities as dictogloss tasks (e.g. reconstructing a dictated text in groups of 4), word games (e.g. fi nding antonyms and synonyms in a text), interactive read-aloud (e.g. taking turns to read a text aloud), listening practice (e.g. identifying different sounds in words), creative writing (e.g. rewriting the ending of a story), and cloze tests (e.g. fi lling in blanks with prepositions). To further control for extra-neous variables, the control group was videotaped in the same way, and taught at the same time, for the same amount of time, and with novels of a similar level of

854.2 Method

dif fi culty, as the experimental group. Moreover, the control group was similarly given pre-class reading and post-class writing assignments.

In the last P4C lesson on 17 March 2005, the experimental group was required to complete the SQ. In order to overcome the problems of response sets and language barrier, students were allowed to make anonymous responses and provided with an English-Chinese glossary for helping them understand the questionnaire’s content respectively. Five days after the end of the experiment (i.e. on 22 March 2005), both the experimental and control groups were administered the NJTRS. The posttest was followed by an in-depth analysis of all data collected in this study. The quantita-tive data from the NJTRS, SQA, and CBC were analysed by means of the statistical package SPSS 13.0 for Windows. As for the qualitative data from the SQB, video recordings, and MTL, they were carefully examined to identify themes relevant to the research questions and thoroughly searched for not only supporting examples for, but opposing evidence against (if any), the emerging themes so as to bring the data to a justi fi ed interpretation.

4.2.4.2 The Problem of Translation

It is noteworthy here that the Harry Stottlemeier ’ s Discovery was not translated into Chinese, although all students involved in this study were Chinese. For one thing, the invitation to students to participate in the present study was issued under the guise of an after-school course in which they were supposed to read an English rather than Chinese novel. For another thing, it was found in a pilot study that a comparable sample of Secondary 1 students in the same school was able to under-stand the English novel, provided that they were aided with a glossary and allowed suf fi cient time to read it (see Sect. 4.2.5.4 ). Finally, and more importantly, the trans-lation of the novel from English into Chinese is beset with a thorny problem that the logical spaces in these two languages – i.e. Aristotelian and Chinese logic respec-tively – are structured differently: Aristotelian logic is based on a hierarchical struc-ture of names for kinds of things that are classi fi ed into genera and species, aiming to identify an object through giving it its correct name; while Chinese logic is based on a yin-yang structure of associative relations for things in a world that is presumed to be ever-changing, aiming to clarify an object through examining its relations with others (Yuan, 2000 ) . Considering that a central theme of the novel is a series of “discoveries” made by the protagonist Harry and his classmates about how to apply Aristotelian logic, but that the logical structures of English and Chinese fail to match, a Chinese translation is likely to present special dif fi culties for students in comprehending the principles of Aristotelian logic and thus the substance of the novel. As Yuan explains it, “Although the propositions, arguments and the steps of demonstrations of Aristotelian logic can be translated into Chinese literally, the logical structures in an English speaker’s mind and in a Chinese speaker’s mind are not translatable” (ibid., p. 148).

Indeed, this view of language as an in fl uence on cognition is shared by many psychologists, a distinguished one of whom is Richard Nisbett. In his widely acclaimed


book entitled The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently … and Why , Nisbett ( 2003 ) demonstrates not only that Western languages encourage the use of nouns, which leads to categorization of objects, whilst Eastern languages encourage the use of verbs, which leads to emphasis on relationships; but also that the differences between languages in linguistic structure are re fl ected in people’s habitual thought. As an illustration of the latter, he cites the result of an inter-esting experiment that Chinese college students, when asked to indicate which two of the given word triplets (e.g. panda, monkey, banana) were most closely related, were more likely to prefer thematic relationships (e.g. monkey and banana, because mon-keys eat bananas) as the basis for grouping when tested in Chinese, yet more likely to prefer taxonomic category (e.g. panda and monkey, because they fi t into the animal category) when tested in English. In other words, language per se seems to in fl uence the way people categorize things. Hence Nisbett’s conclusion that “language does indeed in fl uence thought so long as different languages are plausibly associated with different systems of representation” (ibid., p. 162).

4.2.5 Pilot Study

4.2.5.1 Aims of the Pilot Study

With a view to identifying unanticipated problems in, and thus re fi ning plans for, the main study, a pilot study on Lipman’s P4C programme was conducted at the target school between 25 September and 14 November 2003. More speci fi cally, the aims of this pilot study were the following:

To familiarize the researcher with the procedures for selecting participants, • teaching P4C, collecting data, and analyzing data; To fi nd out whether students were able to read the philosophical novel on their • own and to discuss philosophical questions in a proper manner (especially to follow certain ground rules for philosophical discussion); To explore the feasibility of the method of teaching P4C in respect of the allocation • of time, role of the teacher, use of teaching aids (particularly the instructional manual accompanying the novel and original version of the MTL [OMTL]), and teaching strategies; To evaluate the measuring instruments (namely the NJTRS, CBC, and original • version of the SQ [OSQ]) and revise them if necessary.

4.2.5.2 Method of the Pilot Study

A school circular was sent to the parents of Secondary 1 students of the target school to invite their children to enrol on the P4C programme under the guise of a reading course. Out of 80 students who accepted the invitation (16, 19, 15, 18, and 12 of them came from the classes 1A, 1B, 1C, 1D, and 1E respectively), 3, 3, 3, 3,

874.2 Method

and 2 students were randomly selected as participants from those acceptors of invitation in the classes 1A, 1B, 1C, 1D, and 1E respectively. The researcher, who was a certi fi cated P4C teacher, taught the programme to these 14 participants by means of the Harry Stottlemeier ’ s Discovery , its accompanying instructional manual, and the OMTL.

The P4C lessons, each taking 75 min (i.e. from 4:00 to 5:15 p.m.), were taught twice a week within the period of study. They totalled nine lessons, all but the last one of which were videotaped with a tripod-mounted camcorder in a distant corner of the classroom. The researcher intended to employ a conventional method of teaching P4C: fi rst asking students to read aloud a certain episode in the novel, to share what they found interesting or puzzling about it, and to decide upon a question for whole-group discussion; and then facilitating the discussion in a philosophical direction with the help of the instructional manual (IAPC, 1995 ) . After the discus-sion, students were required to fi nish the OMTL at home as a follow-up to the philo-sophical inquiry in the classroom.

In the last P4C lesson, students were required to complete two measuring instru-ments, viz. the NJTRS and OSQ. With regard to the videotaped discussions, one selected segment of them was transcribed, translated – students were allowed to speak in Cantonese during the lessons – and analysed in two different ways. First, the philosophical content of the transcript was annotated and used as preliminary evidence to demonstrate that students were able to do philosophy. Second, another measuring instrument, viz. the CBC, was used to identify and quantify the students’ cognitive behaviour characteristic of critical thinking in the transcript.

4.2.5.3 Findings of the Pilot Study

The following were the fi ndings of the pilot study that had been carefully considered and followed up when the main study was planned.

Dif fi culty in Reading

The students found it dif fi cult to comprehend the novel due to their problem in understanding its English. In fact, with the help of a glossary in which a large number of English expressions selected from the text were translated into Chinese by the researcher, many students still could not grasp the content of chapter 1 after reading it silently for 40 min in session 1. Rising to the challenge, the researcher decided to depart from the standard practice of asking students to read the novel aloud in turn during the lesson. Instead, using the glossary provided by the researcher as a reading aid, the students were asked to undertake the reading themselves at home, to re fl ect on what was interesting, puzzling or problematical about what was read, and to think of a question for sharing with the group. For one thing, many of them were found to be poor at reading aloud, and there seemed to be “no reason potentially to alienate poor readers at the outset by requiring that they engage, as a preliminary


step to doing philosophy, in an activity in which they have little or no ability (Costello, 2000 , p. 40). For another, giving students suf fi cient time to read at home was thought to be conducive to their comprehension of the novel. The latter was supported by the evidence that the questions presented by students after their home reading of chapter 1 were comparatively more relevant and interesting than those presented by them immediately after their silent reading in session 1. For instance, while four students presented the same question “What is this story talking about?” as if by prior agreement right after their silent reading in session 1, which showed that they didn’t quite understand the content of chapter 1, none of them presented this question again after their home reading. Moreover, three of them could present the following more relevant and interesting questions: “How does Harry fi gure out the answer?”, “Why can Harry think up these things?” and “Are the discoveries of Harry and Lisa about ‘All’ and ‘No’ sentences respectively always true?”.

Rules for Discussion

The students were able to create the following agreed set of rules for discussion on their own.

1. Raise your hand fi rst when you want to speak: whoever raises the hand fi rst can speak fi rst.

2. Share your ideas with everybody once you have them. Don’t hide your ideas. 3. Don’t interrupt when somebody is speaking. 4. Speak louder so that everybody can hear you. 5. Take part in the discussion actively: ask more questions and give more opinions. 6. Don’t just listen without speaking. 7. Don’t say anything that is not relevant to the subject. 8. Don’t use foul language. 9. Listen attentively without making any noise when somebody is speaking. 10. Follow the instructions of the teacher. 11. Concentrate on the discussion. Don’t day-dream. 12. Don’t say senseless things.

The fact that the students could obey most of these rules in all sessions under the researcher ’ s supervision demonstrated their ability to take part in philosophical discussion in a proper and disciplined manner. Embarrassingly, even the researcher himself started breaking the fi rst rule unwillingly in session 3: he invited the silent students, who did not say a word in the fi rst two sessions, to express their views on his own initiative, regardless of those students who raised their hands fi rst. It was found that these silent students could actually follow the discussion and form their opinions; they just kept their thoughts to themselves. Although most students accepted the researcher’s explanation for breaking the rule (i.e. this could make them hear more varied voices) and thus agreed to let him break it occasionally, they still thought that he should respect their right to stay silent and thus should keep such invitation to a minimum.

894.2 Method

Ability to Do Philosophy

The following is a transcript (A) of a 13-min discussion extracted from the discussion in session 4 on the question, “What exactly is Harry thinking about?”. The numbers in square brackets denote the sequence of ideas put forward by the pseudonymous students and the researcher (LCM).

Transcript A

[1] Tony : I think Harry often day-dreams during the lessons. What he thinks up is what he day-dreams about.

[2] Jack : I think Harry is in a half-asleep state but not in a hypnotic trance. He is not fully awake so he doesn’t pay attention.

(LCM stops Kirk from toying with his pen.) [3] Sandra : I think maybe it is the boring lesson that makes Harry think

nonsense. [4] LCM : Can I ask a question fi rst? What do you think is the meaning of

“thinking nonsense”? [5] Jack : Thinking something that is not serious. [6] Tony : When you think nonsense, you may think something odd. [7] Sandra : When you think nonsense, you are thinking something that is

not real. [8] LCM : (To the whole group) Do you agree with these ideas? Or, do

you have other ideas? (There is no response from the group. After 12 s’ silence, LCM speaks again.) [9] LCM : Literally, “thinking nonsense” can mean “directing our thoughts

to nonsense” or “directing our thoughts in a nonsensical way”. But can we really direct our thoughts in a nonsensical way when we are thinking? … Can we think up frivolous things – i.e. think nonsense, according to the de fi nition of Jack – when we are thinking about something seriously? … What exactly is the meaning of thinking? Do frivolous thoughts come from frivolous thinking? What is the meaning of serious and frivolous thinking? Can we really distinguish between these two kinds of thinking?

[10] Jack : What is serious is, for example, something related to the topic under discussion in the lesson. What is frivolous is (doing) something irrelevant to the topic under discussion, say, thinking about geography when you are taking lessons in astronomy.

[11] Sandra : I disagree with him. Because I think “thinking nonsense” is not like that. What is frivolous, I think, is doing something like whispering jokingly to others that the teacher has horns on her head when she is speaking … In other words, thinking about other things sometimes should not be regarded as frivolous. It depends on what you think about. If you think something in order to joke or tease, then you are frivolous.

[12] LCM : Should “thinking something in order to joke or tease” be regarded as “thinking nonsense” then?

[13] Tony : If you have the intention of joking, you should not be regarded as thinking nonsense.

[14] LCM : Under what conditions should one be counted as thinking nonsense then?

(continued)


[15] Tony : If the jokey things you think up arise only from thinking in a really non-sensical way, you think nonsense.

[16] LCM : (To the whole group) Do you understand what he says? (Many students shake their heads.) [17] LCM : Tony, can you explain more? [18] Tony : When you think in a really non-sensical way and think about

jokey things at the same time, you think nonsense. [19] Jack : I disagree slightly with the view that you must be thinking

about jokey things when you think nonsense. For example, after you read a ghost story, maybe you will think of being possessed by a devil. This is not a jokey matter but should be regarded as thinking nonsense.

(LCM stops Kirk from toying with his novel and requests Jack to repeat what he has just said.) … [20] Simon : I think you are in a half-asleep state when you think nonsense. [21] LCM : Why? [22] Simon : Because you can think up these things only when you are

drowsy. You will not think up such frivolous things when you are fully awake.

[23] LCM : Do you mean that when somebody is awake, he or she should not be able to think up those things which can only be thought out by thinking nonsense?

[24] Simon : Yes. [25] LCM : (To the whole group) What do you think? [26] Kenneth : (Looking at LCM) Should those people with mental disorder be

regarded as thinking nonsense? … (LCM reminds the students to look at the person to whom they are responding and asks Kenneth

whether he is questioning LCM or Simon.) [27] Kenneth : (Looking at LCM again) Do people with mental disorder

always think nonsense? Or, does mental disorder arise from thinking nonsense frequently?

[28] LCM : Are you questioning me, Simon or the group? [29] Kenneth : The group … [30] Sandra : Mental disorder is much more serious than thinking nonsense.

Mental disorder is an illness but thinking nonsense is not. Sometimes it (thinking nonsense) is merely like day-dreaming of the brain … We (normal people) sometimes day-dream too. This does not mean that we are people with mental disorder …

(For the sake of argument, LCM brie fl y describes the symptoms of mental disorder to students.) [31] Jack : I think people with mental disorder think nonsense more

frequently. Normal people also think nonsense but less frequently.

[32] LCM : … Does this mean that all people think nonsense? In fact, can we control our brain and prevent it from thinking nonsense?

[33] Kathy : No, we can’t. [34] LCM : Why not? [35] Kathy : Because sometimes when you are day-dreaming you are,

perhaps, thinking nonsense already. [36] LCM : Do you mean we cannot prevent ourselves from day-dreaming? [37] Kathy : Yes.

Transcript A (continued)

914.2 Method

Table 4.1 Annotations for students’ contributions in Transcript A

Contribution Annotation

[1] Implying that one keeps on thinking while day-dreaming [2] Showing awareness of the difference between a half-asleep state and a

hypnotic trance [3] Suggesting boredom as the cause of thinking nonsense [5] Characterizing thinking nonsense as thinking something that is frivolous [6] Characterizing thinking nonsense as thinking something that is odd [7] Characterizing thinking nonsense as thinking something that is unreal [10] & [11] Distinguishing between serious thinking and frivolous thinking [13] Suggesting intention as a decisive factor in the characterization of

thinking nonsense as thinking jokey things [15] & [18] Characterizing thinking nonsense as thinking about jokey things in a

really non-sensical way [19] Refuting the assumption that thinking about jokey things is a necessary

condition for thinking nonsense [20], [22], & [24] Asserting the impossibility of thinking nonsense in a fully-awake state [26] & [27] Questioning the relation between thinking nonsense and mental disorder [30] Drawing a distinction between thinking nonsense and mental disorder [31] Comparing normal people and people with mental disorder in terms of

thinking nonsense [33], [35], & [37] Asserting the impossibility of preventing ourselves from day-dreaming

and thus from thinking nonsense

Considering that “philosophy is thinking about thinking” (Quinton, 1995 , p. 666), this discussion was philosophical in the sense that it was concerned with “thinking about thinking” – indeed, it was centred on the thinking about “thinking nonsense”. In other words, the students were not just doing serious discussion but real philoso-phy in the process of inquiry. Further evidence for their capacity to philosophize came from the fact that they sought clari fi cation, and facilitated correction, of the thoughts of each other. This fact was highly relevant for the reason that “philoso-phy aims at the logical clari fi cation of thoughts” (Wittgenstein, 1921/ 1974b , p. 25), or rather, that “re fl ective thinking which corrects and improves itself is central to philosophy. Philosophy seeks to examine and elucidate the nature of thinking, when that thinking is concerned with matters of judgement and appraisal” (Splitter & Sharp, 1995 , p. 90). For instance, on the one hand, the students were able to challenge the fl awed assumptions of others’ assertions (e.g. Sandra in [11] was able to challenge the assumption of Jack in [10] that thinking irrelevant things was always frivolous) and thus to correct and improve the thinking of others ; on the other hand, they were able to revise their own ideas (e.g. Tony was able to revise his idea about thinking nonsense from what it should not be in [13] to what it entailed in [18]) and thus to correct and improve the thinking of themselves . As shown in Table 4.1 , a set of annotations was made according to the students’ contributions for demonstrating their ability to examine and elucidate the nature of thinking and therefore to do philosophy.


Time, Pace, and Mode

Based on the researcher’s observation and students’ feedback, the appropriate time for each session was found to be 90 min rather than 75 min. Yet, a longer lesson didn’t necessarily mean teaching more things or learning at a faster pace. The rea-son was that the pace of discussion often depended on the capability of students, among whom the individual differences in learning were considerable. In session 2, for example, while most students were still trying hard to fi gure out what it meant by fi nding a counterexample to disprove Harry’s discovery about “All” sentences [i.e. the discovery that if the original “All” sentence with the form “All X are Y” was true (e.g. “All cats are animals”), where X and Y were the subject and predicate of this sentence respectively, then the sentence with the reversed subject and predicate (e.g. “All animals are cats”) would be false], a boy actually came up with such a beautiful counterexample as “All sea animals are animals that live in the sea”, which was still true when its subject and predicate were reversed, within a minute. To strike a balance between limited time and reasonable pace as well as between dis-cussion on Aristotelian logic and other philosophical issues, a moderate bipartite mode of teaching was tried: allocating each chapter a maximum of two sessions for discussing questions about Aristotelian logic and other philosophical issues respec-tively. The result of this trial run was found satisfactory.

Dual Role of the Teacher

Judging from the fact that the students were heavily dependent on the researcher’s directions (e.g. to remind them to pay more attention to the logical form rather than the content of sentences) when discussing questions about Aristotelian logic, and that they often failed to discipline themselves (e.g. to follow the agreed rules for discussion), it seemed inevitable for a P4C teacher to assume the role of a director – providing guid-ance for students and exercising supervision over them – if Lipman’s community of inquiry was to be maintained properly in the classroom. However, another role of the teacher as a facilitator in discussion was found equally important. This role included asking relevant questions to sustain, extend, and focus various lines of thought; request-ing reasons and evidence to support judgements; seeking clari fi cation of ideas and questions; asking for implications and conclusions; summarizing key points to help understanding; rewarding every positive contribution to the discussion with verbal or non-verbal expressions of approval and admiration; and playing the devil’s advocate to stimulate discussion, especially when students were not ready to challenge the viewpoints of others. Dif fi cult as it was, the ful fi lment of the teacher’s dual role as director and facilitator was crucial to the success of the P4C programme.

Importance of the Instructional Manual

The instructional manual accompanying the novel was found very helpful and actually indispensable to the teacher. Filled with discussion plans – each of which

934.2 Method

consisted of a group of questions around a central concept or problem – and exercises for extending leading ideas related to the story, the manual was designed to stimulate students to think more deeply, widely, and systematically about the key topic of discussion; and to “focus the discussion on the topic, to clarify the meanings at issue, and to keep the conversation from straying out of bounds” (Lipman et al., 1984 , p. ii) respectively. Indeed, since the students had hardly any experience of formal logic, thereby having dif fi culty in contributing ideas to dis-cussions about it, the manual was found particularly useful when dealing with logical reasoning: apart from giving students practice in different patterns of logical sentences, the manual contained a lot of well-organized examples in exercises that helped students generalize and infer signi fi cant conclusions. Yet, to make the best use of the manual, the teacher had to be aware of two things. First, students might have dif fi culty in understanding the content of exercises and need the teacher’s clari fi cation and explanation before embarking on them. For example, in session 3, the students spent much time arguing about whether such sentences as “No chickens are birds” and “No squares are rectangles” in exercise 10 of chapter 1 were false without reaching a correct conclusion simply because they didn’t know “chickens” and “squares” belonged to “birds” and “rectangles” respectively. If the researcher had clari fi ed the sentences fi rst without wrongly assuming the students to understand them, the students would not have spent so much time on the argu-ment, which was obviously not the purpose of the exercise. Second, the exercises were built on previous ones and had continuity with one another. In other words, students had better proceed in an orderly way and step by step. This partly explained why those students who had not yet grasped the structure of “All” sen-tences (introduced in chapter 1) made so many mistakes when asked to rewrite everyday language sentences as “All” sentences (in exercise 4 of chapter 2).

Use of My Thinking Log

Constructed with “lead-ins” that were designed to promote visual representation of thoughts (“A picture of my idea looks like …”) and such critical thinking processes as evaluation (“How do you think you did? Why?” & “How do you think we did? Why?”), problem solving (“I conclude that …”) and decision making (“I disagree with …, because …”) (Fogarty, 1991 ) , the My Thinking Log (original version; OMTL) was primarily used here as a follow-up tool for students to review the progress of philosophical discussions after P4C lessons. The students were advised to fi nish the OMTL at home on the same day that they had the P4C lesson (i.e. when they still had a good memory of what had happened in the class) and were required to submit their work to the teacher in the next lesson. It was found that 9 of 14 students agreed or strongly agreed to the statement “Doing My Thinking Log helps me re fl ect on what I think in philosophy lessons” in the OSQ, and that some students could express themselves better if they were allowed to write the OMTL in Chinese. Based on constructive feedback from the students (e.g. the lead-in “I disagree with …, because …” would not work if it so happened that they did not disagree with anyone in the discussion) as well as careful deliberation of the


researcher, the OMTL was modi fi ed to the MTL before it was further used as data collection instrument in the main study.

Effective Strategies

Two problems which commonly occurred during discussion were that students interrupted each other (e.g. speaking or raising their hands when somebody was speaking) and that students did not pay attention (e.g. chatting with their neighbours or toying with their pen). One strategy which was found quite effective for solving these problems was to give students note paper to write down two different kinds of things: what they couldn’t wait to say, including who they agreed or disagreed with, so as to check their impulse to interrupt; and what they or the teacher thought impor-tant to remember, including ideas arising from the discussion, explanations of the teacher, answers to the instructional manual’s exercises, questions selected for group discussion etc., so as to focus their attention. Indeed, the notes taken also served as a timely reminder for students to complete the OMTL at home. Another strategy was to deal with the students’ interruptive or inattentive behaviour immedi-ately, even at the expense of the fl ow of discussion, in order to prevent the spread of such behaviour among the group.

Moreover, since the discussion often tacked back and forth as it proceeded, a sense of incompleteness about the activity might arise at the end of discussion. Although this was partly inevitable in that “enquiry does not end with the discussion but is part of a continuing process of questioning, re fl ection and attempts to formu-late better understanding of complex matters” (Fisher, 1998 , p. 184), one strategy which was found useful for providing a suitable sense of closure was to offer students an opportunity to say their “ fi nal words”: each student in the group was given a fi nal turn – 1 min at most – to say anything about the discussion they had not said before or had not had the chance to say just before the end of the session. To achieve a desir-able result, the teacher should not allow any student to interrupt or respond when somebody was saying fi nal words on the one hand, and should not summarize the whole discussion before students said their fi nal words in order to avoid tempting students into repeating what s/he said on the other. It was found that some silent students who didn’t say a word until the end of discussion sometimes were able to advance interestingly new ideas during the saying- fi nal-words time. Accordingly, this strategy ensured not only that every student could say his or her piece but also that the community of inquiry would not miss any points.

Measuring Instruments

With the assistance of a glossary in which a large number of English expressions selected from the Student Questionnaire (original version; OSQ) and NJTRS were translated into Chinese by the researcher, the students required 25 and 50 min to

954.2 Method

complete the OSQ and NJTRS respectively. Accordingly, the students in the main study were given the same amounts of time to complete the relevant measuring instruments. To compute the internal consistency reliability of these two measuring instruments, the statistical package SPSS 11.0 for Windows was used. It was found that the Cronbach’s coef fi cient alphas for the scaled items in section A of the OSQ (OSQA) and the NJTRS were 0.52 and 0.80 respectively. A high level of internal consistency of 0.80 shown by the NJTRS, together with its validity rightly claimed by its publisher (IAPC, 1987 ) , suggested that the NJTRS could be used with a rea-sonable degree of con fi dence with participants in the main study. As for the OSQA, since the item statistics indicated that the removal of the questions 9, 10, and 11 from it would signi fi cantly improve its internal reliability (indeed, the Cronbach’s coef fi cient alpha would rise from 0.52 to 0.65 if these three items were deleted together), after a careful review of all its items, the questions 9 and 10 were rewrit-ten while the question 11 was deleted to avoid ambiguity. The SQA thus modi fi ed from the OSQA was used in the main study. Besides, the CBC comprising 17 items was used to identify and quantify the students’ cognitive behaviour characteristic of critical thinking in the transcript A of the above-mentioned 13-min discussion. The results are detailed in Table 4.2 .

Table 4.2 shows that the students displayed all but one of the 17 behavioural traits included in the CBC. In particular, they displayed the cognitive behaviour “Seeks to clarify ill-de fi ned concepts” (i.e. item 11) most frequently while none of them “Asks that claims be supported by evidence” (i.e. item 3) during the discus-sion. A possible explanation was that although students were eager to clarify and analyse vague concepts, they were not accustomed to challenge others to substanti-ate their claims openly and directly. Considering that a total of 66 cognitive behav-iours characteristic of critical thinking (approximately fi ve per minute on average) were elicited from the students, irrespective of the relative frequencies of the 17 cognitive behaviours that probably depended on the content of discussion, it appeared that such philosophical inquiry in the classroom helped stimulate students to think critically and thus should be promoted in school. Yet, it remained to be studied whether the favourable outcomes measured by the CBC were signi fi cant and reliable. A possible way of fi nding the answer was to reapply the CBC to the philosophical discussions set up among participants in the main study, so as to determine whether the desirable outcomes produced here by the pedagogic princi-ples of P4C could be maintained.

4.2.5.4 Conclusion of the Pilot Study

To sum up: although many students found it dif fi cult to comprehend the philo-sophical novel due to the language barrier, they could follow most of the agreed rules of discussion and demonstrated their ability to do philosophy in the class-room properly. It was found that the effectiveness of the P4C programme hinged on whether the teacher could modify appropriately the time, pace, and mode


Table 4.2 Quantity and location of students’ cognitive behaviour in Transcript A

CBC item Frequency Whereabouts

1 2 [26] & [27] 2 1 [11]: “In other words, thinking about other things

sometimes should not be regarded as frivolous. It depends on what you think about.” ( i.e. thinking about other things should not be regarded as “ always ” frivolous )

3 0 Nowhere 4 3 [1], [2], & [3] 5 1 [2]: “I think Harry is in a half-asleep state but not in

a hypnotic trance .” 6 3 [20] ( building on the idea of Jack in [2]), [31] ( building on

the idea of Sandra in [30]), & [35] ( building on the idea of Sandra in [30])

7 2 Between [11] & [12] ( because Jack did not behave defensively towards Sandra right after he was criticized by her in [11]); & between [19] & [20] ( because neither Tony nor Sandra behaved defensively towards Jack right after their ideas were criticized by Jack in [19])

8 4 [6], [7], [11], & [19] 9 1 [19]: “I disagree slightly with the view that you must

be thinking about jokey things when you think nonsense.”

10 1 [30] ( between thinking nonsense and day-dreaming of the brain )

11 14 {[5], [6], [7], [13], [15], [18], [19], [20], [26], [27], [30], & [31]} ( clarifying the concept of “ thinking nonsense ”); & {[10] & [11]} ( clarifying the concept of “ being frivolous ”)

12 7 [11], [13], [15], [18], [19], [30], & [31] 13 7 [2], [3], [11], [19], [22], [30], & [35] 14 4 [10]: “What is serious is, for example, something

related to the topic under discussion in the lesson.” ( example );

[10]: “What is frivolous is (doing) something irrelevant to the topic under discussion, say, thinking about geography when you are taking lessons in astronomy.” ( example );

[11]: “What is frivolous, I think, is doing something like whispering jokingly to others that the teacher has horns on her head when she is speaking …” ( example ); &

[19]: “For example, after you read a ghost story, maybe you will think of being possessed by a devil.” ( example )

(continued)

974.3 Results

of teaching; assume capably the dual role as director and facilitator during discussions; employ skilfully such teaching aids as the instructional manual accompanying the novel and My Thinking Log; and adopt fl exibly different types of teaching strategies. Further, while the NJTRS and CBC could be used directly with participants in the main study, the OMTL and OSQ needed to be revised before use.

4.3 Results

4.3.1 Quantitative Data

4.3.1.1 CBC

To fi nd out what role P4C plays in developing students’ critical thinking, a selected segment of videotaped discussions among the experimental group was fi rst transcribed and translated, and then analysed with the CBC to identify and quantify the students’ cognitive behaviour characteristic of critical thinking. The following is a transcript (B) of a 13-min discussion extracted from the discussion in session 6 on the question, “Why does Harry daydream?”. The numbers in square brackets denote the sequence of ideas advanced by the pseudonymous students and the researcher (LCM).

Table 4.2 (continued)


15 3 [11] ( seeking to uncover the assumption of Jack in [10] that thinking irrelevant things is “ always ” frivolous ), [19] ( seeking to uncover the assumption of Tony in [18] that thinking about jokey things is a necessary condition for thinking nonsense ), & [26] ( seeking to uncover the assumption of Simon in [24] that all people , including people with mental disorder , are unable to think nonsense when they are awake )

16 6 [1], [2], [3], [19], [22] ( as the premise of the conclusion in [20]), & [30] ( the premise and conclusion are “ Mental disorder is an illness but thinking nonsense is not ” and “ Mental disorder is much more serious than thinking nonsense ” respectively )

17 7 [2], [11], [13], [15], [18], [19], & [30] Total: 66 cognitive

behaviours


Transcript B

[1] LCM : The experience you have just shared (i.e. you can continue an un fi nished dream after waking for up to a few days) raises some questions: Is your dream created by your mind that tends to see it through to the fi nish? How does your mind create your dream? Does your dream come from something that happens in your daily waking life?

[2] Louis : You mentioned just now that some dreams may come from daily happenings in our waking life. But when I was punched in my dream, it never happened to me in my waking life.

[3] LCM : So, what do you think was the source of your dream then? [4] Louis : It should be myself who thought up the dream without rhyme or

reason. [5] LCM : You mean your dream was a product of your imagination? [6] Louis : Yes, it’s just like the novel called “Superman’s Sky”, which is

entirely a product of imagination. [7] LCM : (To the whole group) What do you think about this idea? [8] Clark : As the Chinese saying goes, “That which one thinks about during

the day, is what one is likely to dream about at night”. (Turning to Louis) Perhaps after reading the novel, you thought about Superman punching monsters all day long, which made you dream about being punched in your sleep.

[9] Frank : I often have dreams, and even continue them after waking for hours, about being hotly pursued by killers until I jump from the cliff or into the sea. But the point is, in response to Clark, I have not thought about being pursued by killers in my waking hours. So, I don’t see the relevance of the Chinese saying.

[10] Leo : Do you have a habit of watching TV dramas? [11] Frank : Yes, I do. [12] Leo : That’s it. Perhaps it is the plot of TV dramas that causes your

dreams. For example, after watching your favourite leading actor being hotly pursued by killers, you may dream about being similarly pursued by the killers.

[13] Frank : I seldom watch TV dramas about such pursuit, so the reason you suggest is quite unlikely in my case.

[14] Thomas : I’m inclined to agree with Leo, because I have dreamt of a demon appearing in my computer class after watching a horror fi lm. My guess is that the frightening scenes of the fi lm caused my subconscious mind to convey frightening messages in my dream.

[15] LCM : (Trying to summarize the points made so far) So, do you mean our mind is like a computer, fi rst storing in the memory all the things that happen to us in our waking life, and then retrieving them selectively, with or without modi fi cation, through certain programs in our dreams? … Do you think it possible to explain the origin of dreams in this way?

(continued)

994.3 Results

Transcript B (continued)

[16] Walter : Yes, I think so. But I have another experience to share: I have had a dream about Batman, perhaps because I’m quite fond of Batman things; oddly enough, after some time, I found that part of what the Batman said in my dream appeared exactly the same in a TV programme about Batman. My question is, is there any chance of what happens in a dream actually happening in real life later? …

(LCM praises Walter for jotting down his thoughts in a notebook while he is waiting his turn to express them.)

[17] Louis : I still think there should be a special reason why I was punched in my dream. Who knows! When I am sleeping, I am not aware of what happens to me outside my dream. Perhaps when I was sleeping, my mother came to slap me on the face just a moment before I was punched in my dream.

[18] LCM : You mean your mother came slapping your face when you were sleeping, causing the punch in your dream?

[19] Louis : I don’t know, because I was sleeping at that time and unaware of the things that happened to me outside my dream.

[20] LCM : But do you think it probable that your mother came to slap you on the face while you were sleeping?

[21] Louis : Yes, I think it somewhat probable. [22] LCM : You mean your mother would come to attack you in your sleep

without rhyme or reason? [23] Louis : Not exactly. Perhaps my mother slapped my face only after I did

something offensive to her in my sleep. [24] LCM : What a harmonious mother-son relationship! [25] Frank : First, in response to Leo, I’m usually not pursued by human

beings in my dreams, but by non-human things like robots, ghosts, and monsters. (Turning to Louis) Second, in response to Louis, I think that a slap outside your dream would not turn into a punch in your dream, because the plot of your dream should have been prearranged by your mind.

[26] LCM : Do you mean that the plot of our dreams will not be affected by external factors when we are dreaming?

[27] Frank : Yes, because it has already been prearranged by our mind, I think.

[28] LCM : (To the whole group) What do you think? [29] Charles : My mother told me, based on her personal experience, that you

would have a nightmare if you were slapped on the face while dreaming. In other words, it is possible for our subconscious mind to be affected by external factors when we are dreaming. The plot of our dreams may not be completely predetermined, but partially improvised like that in live dramas.

[30] Leo : I disagree with Frank’s argument, because I remember that when I was in Primary 6, my mother woke me up for school every day, and that after my mother said to me “Get up, Leo”, I once heard two beeps of a car horn in my dream waking me up. That is, our dreams will be affected by external factors….

(continued)


[31] LCM : You mean your mother’s call “Get up, Leo” outside your dream changed into a car horn’s sound “beep, beep” in your dream?

(Leo nods his head, and the whole group bursts into laughter.) [32] LCM : Really? I have not heard of such translation of sounds before.

What a wonderful experience you have! [33] Tracy : I want to ask a question. How do you describe those people who

move their arms and legs while sleeping? Are they daydream-ing, dreaming, or what?

[34] Louis : I want to refute Frank’s argument, because I think that sometimes the plot of our dreams may not be prearranged by our mind. For example, perhaps my dream was over before my mother slapped me on the face, and was continued only after she gave me the slap, hence the punch in my dream; in other words, the continued part of my dream might be improvised rather than prearranged by my mind.

[35] Frank : (Looking at LCM) Could Louis’ mind be so fast as to make him punched in his dream immediately after he was slapped by his mother?

[36] LCM : Are you questioning me? [37] Frank : Yes, I am. (Frank repeats his question to LCM.) [38] LCM : I cannot answer you this question, because I haven’t had such

experience. You should ask the person who has.

(Frank repeats his question to Louis.)

As shown in Table 4.3 , the students displayed all but one of the 17 behavioural traits included in the CBC. More speci fi cally, during the discussion, they displayed most frequently the cognitive behaviour “Makes balanced evaluative judgments” (i.e. item 17), followed by “Makes relevant distinctions and connections” (i.e. item 12), and “Supports opinions with convincing reasons” (i.e. item 13); yet, none of them displayed the cognitive behaviour “Asks that claims be supported by evidence” (i.e. item 3). Considering that a total of 125 cognitive behaviours characteristic of critical thinking (approximately 10 per minute on average) were elicited from the students, it seemed that conducting philosophical inquiry in the classroom helped stimulate students to think critically. Regardless of the relative frequencies of the 17 cognitive behaviours that were likely to vary with the content of discussion, this result was entirely consistent with – even more positive than – the positive result similarly produced by the application of P4C’s pedagogic principles in the pilot study (see Sect. 4.2.5.3 ), indicating that P4C might play a major role in developing students’ critical thinking.

4.3.1.2 NJTRS

The pretest NJTRS scores and posttest NJTRS scores of the experimental group were compared with those of the control group. Results demonstrated that although there was not a marked difference in the posttest mean scores between the experimental

Transcript B (continued)

1014.3 Results

Table 4.3 Quantity and location of students’ cognitive behaviour in Transcript B


1 4 [10], [16], [33], & [35] 2 3 [29]: “In other words, it is possible for our subconscious

mind to be affected by external factors when we are dreaming. The plot of our dreams may not be completely predetermined, but partially improvised like that in live dramas.” ( i.e. not “ all ” plots of our dreams will be prearranged by our mind and thus unaffected by external factors when we are dreaming );

[30]: “That is, our dreams will be affected by external factors.” ( i.e. not “ all ” our dreams will be unaf-fected by external factors ); &

[34]: “I think that sometimes the plot of our dreams may not be prearranged by our mind.” ( i.e. the plot of our dreams may not be “ always ” prearranged by our mind )

3 0 Nowhere 4 10 [4], [8], [12], [14], [17], [23], [25], [29], [30], & [34] 5 2 [25]: “First, in response to Leo, I’m usually not pursued by

human beings in my dreams, but by non-human things like robots, ghosts, and monsters.”; &

[29]: “The plot of our dreams may not be completely predetermined , but partially improvised like that in live dramas.”

6 6 [9] ( building on the idea of Louis in [4]), [12] ( building on the idea of Clark in [8]), [14] ( building on the idea of Leo in [12]), [29] ( building on the idea of Louis in [17]), [30] ( building on the idea of Charles in [29]), & [34] ( building on the idea of Charles in [29])

7 4 Between [9] & [10] ( because Clark did not behave defensively towards Frank right after his idea was criticized by Frank in [9]); between [25] & [26] ( because Louis did not behave defensively towards Frank right after his idea was criticized by Frank in [25]); between [29] & [30] ( because Frank did not behave defensively towards Charles right after his argument was countered by Charles in [29]); & between [30] & [31] ( because Frank did not behave defensively towards Leo right after his argument was countered by Leo in [30])

8 8 [8], [9], [12], [17], [25], [29], [30], & [34] 9 5 [9]: “So, I don’t see the relevance of the Chinese saying .”;

[25]: “Second, in response to Louis , I think that a slap outside your dream would not turn into a punch in your dream…”;

[29]: “In other words, it is possible for our subconscious mind to be affected by external factors when we are dreaming.”;

[30]: “I disagree with Frank’s argument …”; & [34]: “I want to refute Frank’s argument …”

(continued)




10 6 [6] ( between Louis ’ dream in [5] and the novel here ), [8] ( between the thinking and dreaming processes ), [8] ( between the Chinese saying and Louis ’ situation ), [12] ( between the watching and dreaming processes ), [14] ( between the fi lm and Thomas ’ dream ), & [29] ( between our dreams ’ and live dramas ’ plots )

11 2 [25] ( clarifying the concept of “ killers ” in [9]), & [33] ( clarifying the concept of “ daydreaming ” or “ dreaming ”)

12 14 [2], [6], [8], [9], [12], [13], [14], [17], [23], [25], [27], [29], [30], & [34]

13 14 [8], [9], [12], [13], [14], [16], [17], [19], [23], [25], [27], [29], [30], & [34]

14 11 [2]: “But when I was punched in my dream, it never happened to me in my waking life.” ( counter-example );

[8]: “Perhaps after reading the novel, you thought about Superman punching monsters all day long, which made you dream about being punched in your sleep.” ( example );

[9]: “But the point is, in response to Clark, I have not thought about being pursued by killers in my waking hours.” ( counter-example );

[12]: “For example, after watching your favourite leading actor being hotly pursued by killers, you may dream about being similarly pursued by the killers.” ( example );

[13]: “I seldom watch TV dramas about such pursuit …” ( counter-example );

[14]: “I have dreamt of a demon appearing in my computer class after watching a horror fi lm.” ( example );

[23]: “Perhaps my mother slapped my face only after I did something offensive to her in my sleep.” ( counter-example );

[25]: “I’m usually not pursued by human beings in my dreams, but by non-human things like robots, ghosts, and monsters.” ( example );

[29]: “My mother told me, based on her personal experience, that you would have a nightmare if you were slapped on the face while dreaming.” ( counter-example );

[30]: “I remember that when I was in Primary 6, my mother woke me up for school every day, and that after my mother said to me ‘Get up, Leo’, I once heard two beeps of a car horn in my dream waking me up.” ( counter-example ); &

[34]: “For example, perhaps my dream was over before my mother slapped me on the face, and was continued only after she gave me the slap, hence the punch in my dream …” ( example )

(continued)

1034.3 Results


15 8 [9] ( seeking to uncover the assumption of Clark in [8] that our dreams “ always ” come from what we think about in our waking life ), [13] ( seeking to uncover the assumption of Leo in [12] that Frank “ often ” watches TV dramas about pursuit given by killers ), [25] ( seeking to uncover the assumption of Leo in [12] that Frank is pursued by human beings in his dreams ), [25] ( seeking to uncover the assumption of Louis in [17] that the plot of his dream would be affected by external factors when he was dreaming ), [29] ( seeking to uncover the assumption of Frank in [27] that “all” plots of our dreams are prearranged by our mind and thus unaffected by external factors when we are dreaming ), [30] ( seeking to uncover the assumption of Frank in [27] that “ all ” our dreams are unaffected by external factors ), [34] ( seeking to uncover the assumption of Frank in [27] that the plot of our dreams is “ always ” prearranged by our mind ), & [35] ( seeking to uncover the assumption of Louis in [34] that a slap outside his dream could be “ immediately ” translated into a punch in his dream )

16 13 [2] ( as the premise of the conclusion in [4]), [8], [9], [12], [13], [14], [19], [23], [25] ( the premise and conclusion are “ the plot of your dream should have been prearranged by your mind ” and “ a slap outside your dream would not turn into a punch in your dream ” respectively ), [27], [29], [30], & [34]

17 15 [4], [6], [8], [9], [12], [13], [14], [17], [19], [23], [25], [27], [29], [30], & [34]

Total: 125 cognitive behaviours


( M = 34.71) and control ( M = 34.57) groups, the experimental group showed a greater percentage increase on the pretest mean score (27.89%) than the control group (13.34 %; see Table 4.4 ). These fi ndings indicate that the students who were taught P4C made a bigger improvement in the NJTRS performance than those who were not, being in line with the well-documented effectiveness of P4C in developing students’ reasoning ability.

Table 4.4 Treatment means and variability of pretest and posttest scores

Group a

Pretest Posttest

M SD M SD

Experimental 27.14 5.56 34.71 5.68 Control 30.50 6.10 34.57 5.23

a n = 14 for each group


Table 4.5 Means and standard deviations of students’ responses to Likert-scaled attitudinal statements

Statement a M SD

1 4.00 0.68 2 4.36 0.50 3 3.86 0.66 4 3.43 1.22 5 4.00 0.68 6 4.07 0.62 7 4.29 0.73 8 3.57 1.22 9 4.21 0.70 10 3.36 1.22 11 4.07 0.83 12 3.86 0.66 13 3.93 0.73 14 3.71 1.27 15 3.50 0.76 16 3.71 1.07 17 4.07 1.07 18 4.07 0.73 19 4.29 0.73 20 3.50 1.16

Note : The questionnaire return rate was 100% (n = 14). The scoring (Strongly Agree = 5, Agree = 4, Uncertain = 3, Disagree = 2, Strongly Disagree = 1) was reversed for the negative state-ments (3, 4, 8, 10) before computing the means and standard deviations a The response rate for each statement was 100%

4.3.1.3 SQA

The experimental group was asked to respond to 20 statements in the SQA that examined students’ attitude towards doing philosophy in the classroom. For each statement on a 5-point Likert scale from 1 (“strongly disagree”) to 5 (“strongly agree”), a mean score of 3 was interpreted as representing a neutral attitude, while a mean score of more than 3 and less than 3 a positive and negative attitude respec-tively, towards a certain aspect of doing philosophy in the classroom. As shown in Table 4.5 , the students had the most positive attitude towards the role of philosophy in helping them think better ( M = 4.36, SD = 0.50), followed by the role of philoso-phy in encouraging them to think things in different ways ( M = 4.29, SD = 0.73) and the provision of a safe environment for them to experiment with ideas in philosophy lessons ( M = 4.29, SD = 0.73). The students had the least positive attitude towards the disinclination of philosophy to force them to accept certain beliefs or values ( M = 3.36, SD = 1.22), followed by the provision of enough time for them to think in philosophy lessons ( M = 3.43, SD = 1.22). Although the students were less positive about certain aspects of doing philosophy in the classroom, an overall mean score of 3.89 indicated that they had, in general, a positive attitude towards doing so.

1054.3 Results

4.3.2 Qualitative Data

4.3.2.1 Video Recordings

Apart from examining the role played by P4C in developing children’s critical thinking (see Sect. 4.3.1.1 ), the video recordings of P4C lessons were used to fi nd out whether children could do philosophy and to identify the contributing factors to the success of the P4C programme. To start with, based on careful observation of all the recorded discussions, the students were found to be able to reason and argue in a competent way not only about logic topics (e.g. rules of reasoning, faulty reason-ing, perceptual inferences, inductive reasoning, and analogical reasoning) but also about philosophical problems (e.g. personal identity, reality of thoughts, de fi nition of fairness, nature of thinking, and value of schooling); indicating that they could do philosophy. Indeed, as regards the latter, instead of merely reasoning about the phil-osophical concepts presented in the novel, the students were found to be capable of generating many signi fi cant philosophical issues for discussion on their own, which, according to McCall ( 1989 ) , “provides the strongest support for the claim that they are actually doing [italics added] philosophy, and not simply discussing philoso-phy” (p. 23). Here, the aforementioned discussion on the question “Why does Harry daydream?” (see Transcript B in Sect. 4.3.1.1 ) can be taken as an illustration. Focusing on the nature of dreams, this discussion is philosophical in the sense that dreaming has been a subject of philosophical inquiry throughout the history of Western philosophy: for instance, four questions, which have been addressed by such famous ancient philosophers as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, yet are still important to the study of dreams today, concern the source of dreams, how to dif-ferentiate dreams from waking life, the possibility of prophetic dreams, and whether there is moral agency in dreams (Dreisbach, 2000 ) . The main reason why philoso-phers sustain a lively interest in dreams, as Flanagan ( 2000 ) explains, is that

For anyone interested in the nature of persons, in consciousness, in how the mind-brain works – and especially for anyone interested in issues of personal identity, self-expression, self-knowledge, and self-transformation – dreams represent an especially hard-to- fi t piece of the vast and still largely incomplete puzzle that is the mind. (p. 5)

To demonstrate the students’ capacity for examining and elucidating the nature of dreaming and thus for doing philosophy, a set of annotations was made according to their contributions (see Table 4.6 ).

Second, based on in-depth analysis of all the videotaped lessons, ten contributing factors to the success of the P4C programme were identi fi ed (see Table 4.7 ). The fi ndings con fi rmed, among other things, the importance to P4C’s success of such teaching aids as the Instructional Manual (Factor I) and MTL (Factor F) – see Sect. 4.2.5.3 for relevant fi ndings reported in the pilot study.

4.3.2.2 MTL

Constructed with fi ve lead-ins, viz. “A criticism I have is that …, because …”, “I conclude that …”, “A question I have is …”, “How do you think you did? Why?”,


Table 4.7 Contributing factors to P4C’s success

Source Factor

Lesson 1 : Students found it easier to hear what one said if they could see one’s face when sitting in a horseshoe rather than one’s back when sitting in rows.

A : Providing a favourable physical setting for discussion, such as arranging the seating of students in the shape of a horseshoe so that every student can see each other’s face easily and equally

Lessons 12, 13, & 14 : During these three special lessons that were taught completely in English, in contrast to others that were taught in mixed code (i.e. a combination of Chinese and English), students made frequent requests for allowance to respond in Cantonese and gave an average of 64% of their responses in Cantonese.

B : Adopting “mixed-code” teaching – i.e. using an English novel while communicating with students in Chinese mixed with English phrases – so as to overcome the language barrier created by teaching in English with the English novel, and to avoid the thorny problem of understanding the principles of Aristotelian logic potentially caused by teaching in Chinese with a Chinese translation of the novel (see Sect. 4.2.4.2 )

(continued)

Table 4.6 Annotations for students’ contributions in Transcript B

Contribution Annotation

[2] Challenging the plausibility of the idea that our dreams come from what happen to us in waking life

[4] & [6] Suggesting that dreams are the product of imagination [8] Implying that our dreams come from what we think about in

waking life [9] Refuting the implication that our dreams come from our

thoughts in waking hours [10], [12], & [14] Recognizing the possibility that the plot of TV dramas and fi lms

constitutes a source of dreams [11] & [13] Discounting the possibility of the plot of TV dramas being a

source of dreams [16] Questioning the possibility of dreams being prophetic [17], [19], [21], & [23] Hypothesizing that the plot of our dreams will be affected by

external factors when we are dreaming [25] & [27] Objecting that the plot of our dreams is totally prearranged by

our mind and thus will not be affected by external factors when we are dreaming

[29], [30], & [34] Raising the possibility that the plot of our dreams is not completely predetermined by our mind but partially improvised out of happenings outside our dream

[33] Questioning the distinction between daydreaming and dreaming [35] & [37] Questioning the possibility of our mind translating immediately what

happens outside our dream into what happens in our dream

1074.3 Results


Source Factor

C : Using effective pedagogic strategies: Lessons 1 & 17 : Sometimes it took

students more than 2.5 min to organize their thinking and pluck up enough courage to speak up.

Giving students suf fi cient wait-time to think and respond;

Lesson 1 : Some students were only too ready to challenge and criticize the ideas of others.

Encouraging students to voice and accept justi fi able criticism without taking it personally;

Lessons 2, 7, 18, & 26 : Some students were not clear about certain episodes of the novel.

Quizzing students orally on the content of each chapter to ensure their comprehension of the novel;

Lessons 3, 4, 5, & 22 : Students were often unaware of proper behaviours and good habits in classroom discussions.

Reminding students promptly of what they should do during the discussion, e.g. organizing their ideas carefully before raising their hands;

Lessons 3 & 27 : Sometimes the discussion became intense or stagnant.

Keeping a clear head in order to maintain the focus of, and identify philosophical issues for, discussion;

Lesson 5 : Students found it conducive to their learning to have the teacher helping them summarize the discussion.

Closing the discussion with a summary;

Lessons 9, 10, 16, 21, 22, 24, 25, & 29 : Students found it dif fi cult to grasp key concepts and draw relevant conclu-sions when doing exercises in logic and reasoning.

Discussing thoroughly, rather than checking simply the answers of, the exercises in reasoning and Aristotelian logic (RAL) derived from the Instructional Manual with students;

Lessons 10, 11, & 16 : Students were keen to discuss the topics of RAL.

Teaching the topics of RAL through an inquiry approach instead of direct instruction;

Lessons 15, 16, & 25 : Students found it easier to digest and absorb the main ideas behind the exercises in RAL if they could see the obvious relevance of given examples.

Illustrating dif fi cult concepts related to the topics of RAL with simpli fi ed and localized examples to enhance understanding;

Lesson 18 : Some students were unable to recognize arguments in the novel without acting out the roles of its characters.

Asking students to role-play certain scenes of the novel, especially those they fi nd hard to comprehend;

Lessons 21 & 29 : Students found the topics of RAL easier to follow if they could start with the relevant content of the novel.

Introducing the topics of RAL within the context of the novel;

Lessons 25 & 30 : Students found diagrammatic representation especially effective in helping them to understand the dif fi cult topics of RAL.

Explaining complex concepts related to the topics of RAL by means of diagrams;

(continued)



Source Factor

Lesson 28 : Students were much more interested in discussing contentious ethical issues than apparently uncontroversial ones.

Raising controversial issues for discussion;

Lesson 32 : Some students were unwilling to give response unless they were certain that it was correct.

Setting students a good example that making mistakes in class is not a problem

Lessons 2 & 14 : Students viewed P4C as simply one of their extra-curricular activities, thereby sometimes showing irresponsible behaviours, e.g. being late for class, failure to read the novel at home, etc.

D : Integrating P4C into the formal curricu-lum, instead of running it as an extra-curricular programme, in the hope that students will be more serious about it, and that it will not clash with other extra-curricular activities

Lessons 2, 8, 15, 21, & 32 : Quiet and reserved students were motivated to try and contribute to discussion by the group dynamics created in a commu-nity of inquiry, especially when working on exercises in RAL.

E : Establishing a closely knit community of inquiry in which students feel safe and encouraged to explore their ideas, understanding that they are not debaters or competitors, but co-inquirers and truth-seekers

Lessons 3, 6, & 20 : Students found the MTL helpful in the sense that it could give them the opportunity of express-ing their thoughts, which they might not have due to the constraints of discussion time and personal character.

F : Using MTL as a tool for closure of discussion, which enables students to form personal judgements about the progress and value of the philosophical inquiry

Lessons 4, 5, 6, 7, 15, 16, & 21 : Students were capable of behaving properly in a community of inquiry if they were persistently required to discipline themselves to follow the rules for discussion.

G : Maintaining good discipline in the community of inquiry, for example, by fi rst asking students to formulate a set of rules for discussion, and then assigning a monitor to ensure observance of these rules

Lessons 5, 22, & 30 : Students responded positively to, and participated actively in discussion about, the exercises in RAL.

H : Assigning students a reasonable amount of exercises in the topics of RAL as homework so as to consolidate and extend what they have learnt in class

Lessons 11, 13, 23, & 24 : Sometimes students depended a lot on the teacher to stimulate their thinking and give them explanation during the inquiry process.

I : Making meticulous preparations for lessons by means of the Instructional Manual, which helps not only to sustain philosophical discussions with students, but also to explain dif fi cult concepts in the topics of RAL

Lesson 23 : Sometimes students, even the quiet and reserved ones, got emotional and interfered with the discussion.

J : Giving after-class individual counsel-ling to students who repeatedly display disruptive or negative emotional behaviours in class, possibly arising from con fl icts between them and other members in, or between them and others outside, the community of inquiry

1094.3 Results

Table 4.8 Students’ responses to lead-ins

Response Example

1. Criticisms COI Discipline A criticism I have is that some classmates put up their hands while

somebody is speaking , because they disturb the listeners like me and are very impolite to the speaker .

Other Group Members’ Ideas

A criticism I have is that Walter says that a good student can make a bad teacher become good , because I think that the character of a person is not easy to be changed .

Researcher’s Teaching Strategies

A criticism I have is that it is not good to draw lots to decide which question to discuss , because the question drawn may not be the best .

2. Conclusions I conclude that it remains unfair to deal with an unfair situation by using a fair method , because a negative and a positive make a negative .

3. Questions RAL Topics A question I have is “ Why do we need to learn standardization of

sentences ( i.e. rewriting of everyday language sentences as logical sentences )?”

General Philosophy Topics

A question I have is “ If a man loses his memory completely , will he still be ‘ he ’?”

Researcher’s Teaching Strategies

A question I have is “ Can Mr. Lam ( i.e. the researcher ) assign us the MTL only on Thursdays ?”

4. Evaluations How do you think you did? Why? I think I did very well in the lesson , because I was very active and

tried to answer a lot of questions. 5. Pictures A picture of my idea looks like … (see Fig. 4.1 )

and “A picture of my idea looks like …”, the MTL was used to explore whether its utilization could contribute to the success of the P4C programme and to the devel-opment of students’ critical thinking. A comprehensive analysis of all completed MTLs showed that the students’ responses to the fi rst lead-in (i.e. criticisms) were mainly concerned with discipline in the community of inquiry (COI), ideas of other group members, and teaching strategies of the researcher, while those to the third lead-in (i.e. questions) were mainly concerned with topics of reasoning and Aristotelian logic (RAL), general philosophy topics, and teaching strategies of the researcher. On the whole, the students’ responses to the fi ve lead-ins (i.e. criticisms, conclusions, questions, evaluations, and pictures respectively) were found to be relevant, thoughtful, and reasonable, as illustrated in Table 4.8 .

Considering that the students were keen both to express criticisms about the COI’s discipline and the researcher’s teaching strategies and to raise questions about the researcher’s teaching strategies, the MTL served as a feedback tool for collect-ing useful information from students (especially the quiet and reserved ones) on, and thus helping to improve the operation of, the COI; indicating that the applica-tion of MTL could contribute to the success of the P4C programme. For instance, it was the questions raised by the students in the MTL about the practical value of RAL topics (see Table 4.8 ) that prompted the researcher to modify his teaching strategies, or rather to place more emphasis on the practical use of these topics in daily life, thereby increasing their motivation to learn.


With regard to the development of the students’ critical thinking, the important fact of their general response to the lead-ins being relevant, thoughtful, and reason-able demonstrated that the application of MTL could contribute to it. This can be understood in two ways. First, the MTL served as an evaluation tool for helping students to systematically re fl ect on their own learning process. The signi fi cance of such practice of self-re fl ection lay in opening up the possibility of self-correction – a core component of critical thinking. Indeed, echoing the view here that evaluation is vital to the development of re fl ective or critical thinking, Lien ( 2004 ) asserts that

it’s imperative for the teacher or facilitator to devote suf fi cient time to do the evaluation at the end of each P4C session. In that process children are given a chance to exercise and internal-ize re fl ective thinking through recalling how they were doing in the session. (p. 74)

Second, the fi rst four lead-ins of the MTL, which intended students to use words or language as a vehicle for thinking, were speci fi cally designed to draw them into various critical thinking processes, including decision making, problem solving, and evaluation (see Sect. 4.2.2.5 ). However, the importance of the fi fth lead-in, which intended students to use visual images as a vehicle for thinking, cannot be underestimated (see Fig. 4.1 ). The reason is that visual imagery is conducive to tackling certain problems (especially those concerned with spatial, holistic, and metaphoric operations) language is inadequate for, if not incapable of, helping to solve; thereby giving students greater fl exibility in their use of vehicles for critical thinking (McKim, 1980 ) . For example, Venn diagrams, as a mode of spatial repre-sentation, can be used to facilitate reasoning about sets by allowing detection of such relational properties as whether one region overlaps or includes another (Pylyshyn, 2003 ) . As Arnheim ( 1965 ) summarizes,

Visual thinking aims at clarity obtained by signi fi cant order. In the course of such a thought process, a confusing and incoherent situation of uncertain relations is restructured, orga-nized, simpli fi ed until the mind is rewarded for its labor by an image that makes meaning visible. (p. 12)

Fig. 4.1 An illustration of how students use visual images as a vehicle for thinking

1114.3 Results

4.3.2.3 SQB

The experimental group (n = 14) was asked to respond to 2 free-response questions in the SQB that examined students’ attitude towards doing philosophy in the classroom. For question 1, the results demonstrated that 100% of the students thought that there should be philosophy in schools, indicating a wholly positive attitude towards philosophical inquiry in the classroom. The reasons they set out are cogent and listed as follows:

1. Philosophy is fun. 2. Philosophy is useful to everyone. 3. Philosophy is an important kind of knowledge. 4. Philosophy is very broad: it can broaden the mind of students. 5. Philosophy makes me more interested in thinking. 6. Philosophy enables me to think more effectively by changing my usual mode of

thinking. 7. Philosophy enables us to learn some theories faster in the future. 8. Philosophy can improve my thinking. 9. Philosophy can help us think more deeply. 10. Philosophy can help students learn how to think. 11. Philosophy can make students think for themselves without relying on outside

authorities. 12. Philosophy can be learnt more effectively if it is incorporated into the school

curriculum. 13. Doing philosophy can strengthen students’ ability to philosophize. 14. Taking philosophy classes has made me more con fi dent than before in other

classes. 15. The philosophy classes allow students plenty of time for thinking. 16. The philosophy course has taught me lots of things that I cannot normally learn

in school. 17. The philosophy course offers us ample opportunity to express our ideas freely,

which, indeed, has boosted my con fi dence in communicating my ideas in other discussions.

18. We can acquire a wealth of knowledge about philosophy, which is conducive to our learning in other areas.

19. We can learn philosophy free of charge through a novel taught by a professional teacher.

20. We can collaborate with classmates in exploring philosophical problems when they arise.

As for question 2 concerning the things students liked and disliked most in philoso-phy classes, the results demonstrated that all but one (i.e. participant 7) of the stu-dents could explain clearly their likes and dislikes (see Table 4.9 ). While most of the students liked most discussing various issues (especially philosophical ones) during philosophy classes, most of them disliked most doing follow-up work (espe-cially the MTL) after the classes. Four students (i.e. participants 2, 4, 9, and 12),


Tabl

e 4.

9 R

easo

ns f

or li

kes

and

disl

ikes

in p

hilo

soph

y cl

asse

s

Lik

es

Dis

likes

Part

icip

ant

Thi

ng

Rea

son

Thi

ng

Rea

son

1 T

hink

ing

It k

eeps

us

activ

e in

sol

ving

pro

blem

s.

Cla

ssm

ates

talk

with

out t

he

teac

her’

s pe

rmis

sion

. It

doe

s no

t res

pect

oth

ers,

and

will

m

ake

othe

rs u

nabl

e to

thin

k at

al

l. 2 a

We

can

lear

n th

ings

. T

hey

may

be

usef

ul to

us.

T

he le

sson

tim

e is

too

long

. It

is to

o da

nger

ous

for

us to

leav

e sc

hool

in th

e la

te a

fter

noon

. 3

I ca

n ra

ise

ques

tions

an

d gi

ve r

espo

nses

fr

eely

.

The

teac

her

allo

ws

us m

axim

um

free

dom

to d

o so

. D

oing

the

MT

L

It is

too

bori

ng.

4 b D

iscu

ssin

g th

ings

W

e ca

n ex

chan

ge id

eas

with

eac

h ot

her.

Doi

ng e

xerc

ises

in lo

gic

and

reas

onin

g So

me

of th

em a

re d

if fi c

ult t

o do

.

5 D

iscu

ssin

g qu

estio

ns

from

the

nove

l T

he q

uest

ions

are

abo

ut p

hilo

soph

y,

and

the

disc

ussi

on is

inte

rest

ing.

D

oing

the

MT

L

It c

onsu

mes

my

time,

yet

can

not

help

me

re fl e

ct o

n w

hat I

thin

k in

phi

loso

phy

less

ons.

6

The

less

ons

are

full

of

hum

our.

Stud

ents

will

fi nd

the

less

on v

ery

inte

rest

ing

if it

s at

mos

pher

e is

pl

easa

nt.

The

less

on ti

me

is s

o lo

ng.

Nin

ety

min

utes

are

too

long

for

us.

7 D

iscu

ssin

g th

ings

I

can

disc

uss

som

e to

pics

out

side

te

xtbo

oks.

–

–

8 Ph

iloso

phy

can

mak

e st

uden

ts th

ink

mor

e de

eply

.

Stud

ents

will

be

mor

e cl

ever

if th

ey

exte

nd th

eir

thin

king

thro

ugh

philo

soph

y.

The

thin

king

invo

lved

in

philo

soph

y is

too

long

an

d ha

rd.

Stud

ents

mig

ht e

asily

fee

l diz

zy

and

even

get

tire

d of

doi

ng

philo

soph

y.

9 c T

he c

ours

e ca

n en

cour

age

us to

di

scus

s th

ings

.

It w

ill im

prov

e m

y th

inki

ng s

kills

. T

he le

sson

tim

e is

a b

it to

o lo

ng.

We

are

alre

ady

very

tire

d af

ter

taki

ng 8

less

ons

in s

choo

l.

10

Dis

cuss

ing

prob

lem

s Ph

iloso

phic

al p

robl

ems

are

quite

in

tere

stin

g, a

nd d

iscu

ssio

ns a

bout

th

em n

ot o

nly

allo

w u

s to

sha

re

view

s w

ith e

ach

othe

r bu

t alw

ays

mak

e m

e la

ugh.

Doi

ng e

xerc

ises

in lo

gic

and

reas

onin

g T

hey

are

bori

ng, d

if fi c

ult,

and

time-

cons

umin

g.

1134.3 Results

Lik

es

Dis

likes

Part

icip

ant

Thi

ng

Rea

son

Thi

ng

Rea

son

11

We

can

expr

ess

our

idea

s fr

eely

. W

e ar

e no

t allo

wed

to d

o so

in s

ome

clas

ses.

D

oing

the

MT

L

Som

etim

es w

hen

ther

e is

a lo

t of

hom

ewor

k gi

ven

by o

ther

te

ache

rs, i

t is

dif fi

cult

to s

pare

th

e tim

e fo

r it.

12

d D

iscu

ssio

n It

hel

ps m

e to

fi nd

the

answ

er to

man

y pr

oble

ms

and

stim

ulat

es m

e to

th

ink

abou

t man

y th

ings

I h

ave

not

thou

ght a

bout

bef

ore.

The

MT

L

My

expr

essi

on o

f id

eas

is

som

etim

es r

estr

icte

d by

its

lead

-ins

.

13

Cla

ssm

ates

sha

re th

eir

inte

rest

ing

thin

gs o

r th

ough

ts.

Thi

s ca

n m

ake

the

less

ons

mor

e in

tere

stin

g an

d ha

ppy.

W

e ar

e so

met

imes

giv

en

too

muc

h ho

mew

ork.

W

e ca

n ha

rdly

spa

re th

e tim

e fo

r it

whe

n ot

her

teac

hers

set

us

a lo

t of

hom

ewor

k at

the

sam

e tim

e.

14

Col

labo

rativ

e di

scus

sion

I

feel

hap

py w

hen

ever

yone

con

trib

-ut

es id

eas

colla

bora

tivel

y in

the

disc

ussi

on.

Cla

ssm

ates

oft

en c

hat w

ith

thei

r ne

ighb

our.

It m

akes

me

unab

le to

con

cent

rate

, an

d so

met

imes

eve

n m

iss

som

e va

luab

le in

form

atio

n.

Not

e : A

das

h in

the

cell

indi

cate

s th

at th

e da

ta w

as n

ot r

epor

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Table 4.10 Answers to research questions

Research question Data source Answer

1 Video Recordings Students can do philosophy, as evidenced by their ability to reason and argue in a competent way not only about logic topics but also about philosophical problems.

2 CBC, Video Recordings, NJTRS, and MTL

P4C plays a major role in developing students’ critical thinking in that it can elicit from them a large variety and quantity of cognitive behaviours characteristic of critical thinking, help them develop their reasoning ability, and promote – through the MTL – their re fl ective, critical, and visual thinking.

3 NJTRS Students who are taught P4C show a greater improvement than those who are not in the reasoning test performance.

4 Video Recordings and MTL The contributing factors to the success of the P4C programme include the following:

Providing a favourable physical setting for discussion; Adopting mixed-code teaching; Using effective pedagogic strategies; Integrating P4C into the formal curriculum; Establishing a closely knit community of inquiry; Using MTL as a tool for closure of discussion; Maintaining good discipline in the community of

inquiry; Assigning students a reasonable amount of exercises

in the topics of RAL as homework; Making meticulous preparations for lessons by

means of the Instructional Manual; Giving after-class individual counselling to students

who repeatedly display disruptive or negative emotional behaviours in class.

5 SQA and SQB Students have a very positive attitude towards doing philosophy in the classroom.

who made a constructive suggestion each on their own initiative about how to improve the philosophy course, showed a particularly positive attitude towards doing philosophy in the classroom.

4.3.3 Answers to Research Questions

The results from the analysis of both quantitative and qualitative data were used to answer the fi ve research questions of the present study, as summarized in Table 4.10 . For the fi rst and third research questions, the answer came from a single data source,

1154.4 Discussion

viz. the video recordings and NJTRS respectively. As regards the other research questions, the answer came from more than one, yet mutually supportive, data source: the CBC, video recordings, NJTRS, and MTL for the second research ques-tion; the video recordings and MTL for the fourth research question; and the SQA and SQB for the fi fth research question.

4.4 Discussion

4.4.1 Conclusions

The results of this study fully answered the fi ve research questions posed at the beginning. The Secondary 1 students who were taught P4C were found to show a greater improvement in the reasoning test performance than those who were not (question 3), to be capable of doing philosophy as evidenced by their ability to reason and argue in a competent way not only about logic topics but also about philosophical problems (question 1), and to have a very positive attitude towards doing philosophy in the classroom (question 5). It was also found that P4C played a major role in developing the students’ critical thinking, because it could elicit from them a large variety and quantity of cognitive behaviours characteristic of critical thinking, help them develop their reasoning ability, and promote – through the MTL – their re fl ective, critical, and visual thinking (question 2). Besides, a total of ten contributing factors to the success of the P4C programme were identi fi ed as follows: providing a favourable physical setting for discussion, adopting mixed-code teaching, using effective pedagogic strategies, integrating P4C into the formal curriculum, establishing a closely knit community of inquiry, using MTL as a tool for closure of discussion, maintaining good discipline in the community of inquiry, assigning students a reasonable amount of exercises in the topics of RAL as homework, making meticulous preparations for lessons by means of the Instructional Manual, and giving after-class individual counselling to students who repeatedly display disruptive or negative emotional behaviours in class (question 4).

The results were consistent with research on P4C in general, and in particular with the fi ndings of Jenkins ( 1986 ) and Allen ( 1988 ) concerning the improvement of student performance in the reasoning test, as well as with those of Jackson ( 1993 ) and Pálsson ( 1996 ) concerning the adoption of a positive attitude by students towards doing philosophy in the classroom. Indeed, the signi fi cance of the present study lies mainly in the implications of these results for fi ve things: the capacity of Hong Kong children to do philosophy, the effectiveness of Lipman’s P4C pro-gramme on promoting critical thinking in children within a Chinese or Confucian context, the teaching of critical thinking for Hong Kong secondary students, the practicalities of implementing the P4C programme, and the attitude of students towards philosophy classes.


4.4.2 Recommendations

However, this study has two main limitations. First, the results cannot be generalized to all Hong Kong students because its sample came from a co-educational non-religious secondary school with Band 1 Chinese students only. Second, the researcher, as a P4C innovator in his school and school system, had no collaborators or mentors to help him evaluate and enhance his ways of conducting philosophical discussions. In response to these limitations, two speci fi c suggestions can be made for future research. On the one hand, in order to increase the generalizability of the results, further studies should be designed to replicate the present study in other settings (e.g. single-sex schools, religious schools, primary schools, etc.) and with other par-ticipants (e.g. students of different band levels, students of different achievement levels, students of different class levels, etc.). On the other hand, considering that “teachers need signi fi cant levels of ongoing support and development opportunities to sustain cognitive educational approaches [like P4C] on a wider scale” (Trickey & Topping, 2004 , p. 377), future researchers should explore the possibility of seeking professional help from local P4C experts who can ideally act as on-the-spot coach-mentors to fi ne-tune their teaching through lesson demonstration and observation. Moreover, current trends in the empirical study of P4C practice suggest that future researchers should focus on both the application of new research methodologies and technological tools to analyse the processes of P4C discussions (e.g. application of a software program called QSR Nvivo for a code-based analysis of various argument stratagems used by students during the discussions), and the use of performance-based assessments to measure complex cognitive outcomes in students (e.g. use of an open-ended task for measuring students’ argumentative abilities in the form of a face-to-face interview or essay writing) (Reznitskaya, 2005 ) .

Much research has revealed that most classroom discussions are not dialogic but teacher-centred, encouraging reproduction of what the teacher already knows (Billings & Fitzgerald, 2002 ) . Although these teacher-centred discussions, being discussions of some sort instead of lectures, serve to engage students in an active manner, they communicate, wittingly or unwittingly, that the teacher’s authority is privileged in the classroom. Given that the concept of teacher authority is closely associated with a transmission model of learning emphasizing the transmission of knowledge from teachers as unquestionable authorities to students as passive recipi-ents, it runs counter to the goal of fostering critical thinking. In fact, it is exactly this traditional structure of teacher authority in schools that is challenged by P4C’s com-munity of philosophical inquiry (CPI). More speci fi cally, the CPI promotes a new form of adult-child relationship, founded on reason rather than authority and on dialogue rather than indoctrination (Kennedy, 2004 ) . The signi fi cance of such pro-motion consists in its contribution to the reconceptualization of childhood for social justice – a key issue that needs to be dealt with (see Chap. 5 ) in order to genuinely and effectively foster critical thinking in children. As Kennedy asserts,

CPI as a normative educational form has enormous implications for the evolution of a form of social life that seeks to overcome relations of domination – beginning with the adult-child relation – as a necessary form of power for the maintenance of individual and group order and stability. (Ibid., p. 763)

http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-981-4451-06-2_5

117References

Admittedly, learning to reason and dialogue in a critical way is a formidable and laborious task for children. Yet, nowadays, it is incumbent upon teachers to help them accomplish it with such effective educational programmes as P4C. The reason is that the ensuing learning attained – in particular, the understanding that ambiguity and uncertainty are essential prerequisites for achieving a good solution, and that criticism plays a pivotal role in the evolution of ideas and perspectives – is in accord with a form of education which will enable children to rise to the challenges inherent in both the rapid expansion of knowledge and the growing complexity of life in society (Daniel et al., 2005 ) .

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Chapter 4 An Empirical Study of the Effectiveness

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