THE DEVELOPMENT OF CRITICAL THINKING CORE COMPETENCY FOR PRE-SERVICE TEACHERS BY USING INTEGRATION ACTIVITY PACKAGES WITH INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACH IN MOOCS OPEN SYSTEM

Abstract

Nowadays, digital technology plays an important role in education. Open online learning systems (MOOCs) have become an important option to support the development of learners' learning and critical thinking skills. This article aimed to
1) design and create an integrated activity set through an interdisciplinary approach in an open online system (MOOCs) to enhance the critical thinking competence of student teachers, 2) evaluate the effectiveness of this interdisciplinary online activity set, and 3) examine the effects of using the MOOCs-integrated activity set on the critical thinking competence of student teachers. The sample group consisted of student teachers from Phranakhon Rajabhat University in the first semester of the 2022 academic year, selected through multi-stage sampling. The experimental group, consisting of 30 students, engaged with the interdisciplinary activity set via MOOCs, while the control group of 30 students used a different set of activities that did not use the interdisciplinary activity set via MOOCs. Data analysis employed mean, standard deviation, and dependent and independent t-tests.

The findings showed that: 1) The interdisciplinary activity set in MOOCs format exceeded the established effectiveness criteria (76.12/77.31, higher than the 75/75 benchmark), with an effectiveness index of 0.6077 or 60.77%, surpassing the target threshold of 50%. 2) The experimental group demonstrated significantly higher critical thinking competence after the intervention at the 0.05 level, while the control group showed no statistically significant difference before and after the intervention at the same significance level. 3) Comparing the post-test results between the experimental and control groups, the experimental group exhibited significantly higher critical thinking competence than the control group at the 0.05 significance level. These findings suggested that the interdisciplinary approach, combined with MOOCs, effectively supports the development of critical thinking skills.