Abstract :

The aim of the study was to investigate the effects of case study teaching on learners’ critical thinking skills in Grade 10 Physical Sciences classrooms. A non-equivalent (pre-test and post-test) control-group quasi-experimental design was adopted for the purposes of this study. The sample consisted of 122 learners from four schools (70 learners from two rural – 29 for experimental group and 41 for control group) and 52 from two urban schools (30 experimental group and 22 control group). A multistep sampling process was implemented in selecting the participating schools. Two schools were treated as the experimental groups and the other two as control groups. The intervention in the experimental group was case study teaching, while in the control group the traditional lecture method was implemented. The results of this study indicated that case study teaching improved learners’ critical thinking skills and that the urban learners’ critical thinking skills improved three times more than that of their rural counterparts. The results also indicate that there is no significant difference in the way case study teaching improved the critical thinking of the female participants compared to how it improved that of their male counterparts.

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Keywords :

Case study teaching, Communicative action, Context-based learning, Critical thinking skills. Physical Sciences, Social constructivism

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