Promoting critical thinking through effective group work: A teaching intervention for Hong Kong primary school students

•Kuhn's model has positive effects on students’ development of critical thinking.•The key strategies of effective group work in the SPRinG project are applicable to HK.•The teaching intervention enhanced students’ critical-thinking ability.•A desirable lesson duration is a necessary condition for high-quality group work.•Briefing and debriefing facilitate students’ cooperation and self-reflection.

More than two hundred Primary 5 students (11–12 years of age at Key Stage 2) at two primary schools in Hong Kong participated in a teaching intervention in which they learned how to make reasoned arguments through various problem-solving activities, such as peer critiquing and collaborative graffiti. Informed by the SPRinG project in the UK, this paper explores whether a set of group work strategies can make a difference to students’ learning of critical thinking. The findings reported herein, which are based on the results of reasoning tests and analysis of the graffiti task, reveal that the teaching intervention led to a significant enhancement of students’ critical-thinking ability. In addition to the group work strategies, which were found to be effective in the teaching intervention, the paper also addresses the corresponding school-based conditions and practical constraints to group work implementation.