Effects of Cooperative Learning Combined with Critical Thinking on Chinese Reading Ability of Fourth-grade Students in Zhengzhou Chuangyi Primary School

Background and Aims: In recent years, China's Ministry of Education has introduced a series of education reform policies, emphasizing the importance of cultivating students' reading skills. For example, "Primary School Chinese New Curriculum Standard" clearly points out that primary school Chinese education should pay attention to students 'active learning and cooperative inquiry, and improve students' reading ability. The objective of this study is: 1) To compare the Chinese reading ability before and after receiving cooperative learning combined with critical thinking, 2) To compare the Chinese reading ability after using cooperative learning combined with critical thinking with the criterion of 70 percent, and 3) To assess students’ satisfaction learning through cooperative learning combined with the critical thinking. Methodology: This study utilized a pre-experimental design featuring a one-group pretest-posttest model. The sample was 30 grade 4 students from Zhengzhou Chuangyi School, Henan Province, China. They derived from cluster random sampling. The research tools are: (1) the six lessons of the Chinese Course with a mean of congruence of 4.62; (2) the Chinese reading ability evaluation form, reliability index is .735; (3) the student satisfaction questionnaire, reliability index is.717, The statistics used to analyze the data are mean, standard deviation, t-test for sample-dependent, and t-test for one sample. Conduct a pretest and post-test on the sample using the Chinese reading ability form test, and analyze the mean, standard deviation, paired sample t-test, and one-sample t-test of the data using statistical software. Result: After using cooperative learning combined with critical thinking, 1) Students' Chinese reading ability is higher than before learning, with a statistically significant difference of .01; 2) the Chinese reading ability test result is above 70%, and the difference is statistically significant at .01; and 3) Students have a higher satisfaction rate after learning through cooperative learning combined with critical thinking (M = 4.02, SD = 0.77). Conclusion: This study shows that students' Chinese reading ability can be significantly improved through cooperative learning combined with critical thinking. The various stages of cooperative learning combined with critical thinking, including Problem setting and guidance, Group cooperation construction, Critical thinking training, Information sharing and integration, Reflection, and Summary, all play a positive role in promoting the improvement of students' reading ability. Moreover, students had high satisfaction with this teaching model, which further verified the effectiveness and feasibility of this teaching method.