Dr. Tamene Kitila (PhD)Yemeserach Bayou2024-06-272024-06-272024-01https://etd.aau.edu.et/handle/123456789/3268The requirement for students' critical thinking (CT) skills in academic writing, particularly inhigher education, prompts the promotion of students’ CT skills in writing classes to gain prominentattention. This study, therefore, sought to investigate instructors’ beliefs and practices inpromoting students’ CT skills in university writing classes and students’ CT and writingperformances. The study had a multiple case study design. Six purposively selected instructorsalong with 244 students from Debre Tabor University were participated. Classroom observation,interviews, questionnaire, document analysis, and essay writing were the data-gatheringinstruments used in the study. Qualitative and quantitative data analysis approaches served toanalyze the data. The findings revealed that the instructors interpreted CT as the ability to havean in-depth understanding, reflect ideas logically, and look at things from multiple perspectives inwritten works. They mentioned several CT skills-promoting instructional mechanisms such asinput provision, facilitating, process writing approach, writing-and-reading skills integration,collaborative work, and explicit CT skills introduction. They advocated argumentative, causeeffect,compare-and-contrast, summary writing, jigsaw tasks, and jumbled sentences as CT skillspromotingwriting activities in writing classes. On the contrary, despite their beliefs that the inputsshould be a little beyond students' current level (i+1), and complemented with a Socraticquestioning method, the inputs hardly involved novel contents. Most of the instructor-initiatedquestions sought for students’ knowledge and comprehension skills. Besides, the instructorsdenied a separate time for students to read the passages before doing the writing activities.Similarly, the explicit introduction of CT skills was not prevalent in the writing classes. Thecorrelation result, on the other hand, indicated a strong positive association among students' CTperformance, writing performance, and SPPCTW. The SPPCTW sub-scales (CI, IM, NWA, SFP)significantly predicted students’ CT and writing performances, respectively. The result showedstudent-related factors: negative perceptions towards writing, negligence of CT-orientedactivities, and poor writing competence. The instructor-related factors included limited CT ability,negative perceptions of CT skills promotion, and a tendency to content coverage. Situationalfactors related to large class sizes, time constraints, and inadequate material preparation werethe other obstacles. Therefore, it was recommended that instructors should reconsider their beliefsand reflect on their practices. Further studies shouldinvestigatesources of instructors’ beliefs andstudents’ perceptions and their implementation of CT skills in writing lessons.en-USCritical thinking (CT) skillsThesis