A development of history instructional model on cloud technology to enhance critical thinking abilities and information literacy of undergraduate students

Abstract

Approaches to the teaching and learning of history in the 21st-century call for teachers’ embracing changes due to the advent of advanced technologies, while critical thinking and information literacy are increasingly necessary for students’ handling of overwhelming information. The purpose of this study was to develop, present, and assess the effectiveness of an instruction model which incorporates the use of cloud technology for teaching history at the university level in Thailand. Along with its learning management plan, this instructional model was validated by experienced teachers and triangulated with IT experts in the history subject before implementing it with a purposively sampled group of students in the Faculty of Education. A total of 189 undergraduate students were randomly selected for data collection. The findings were obtained from the analysis of the qualitative interview data and the quantitative information, which were then analyzed using the repeated measures ANOVA in the SPSS program. The results revealed the following: (1) this instructional model of teaching the history subject on cloud technology can enhance the critical thinking abilities and information literacy of undergraduate students in terms of rationales, objectives, methods, and conditions; (2) according to the data obtained from questionnaires, the instruction model was evaluated by 5 experts as having a high level of appropriateness (mean = 4.89, SD = 0.32); and (3) the result on an assessment of the quality of the learning management shows a statistically significant difference in the mean scores over four weeks at the 0.05 level of significance (p > .05).