A study of the effect of peer assessment on children’s critical thinking in a kindergarten craft course

Critical thinking, as one of the core literacies in the twenty-first century, is essentially the thinking process of making reasonable inferences, questioning and analyzing based on factual evidence. In this paper, we first coded the kindergarten manual class group peer evaluation text through the critical thinking framework proposed by Facione, then processed the text using epistemic network analysis techniques to obtain a network model of critical thinking skills, and finally analyzed the effects of peer evaluation on children's critical thinking skills. The results of the study show that (1) there are differences in the effects of peer evaluation on children's critical thinking skills at different stages. The difference was significant in the early and middle stages, and non-significant in the middle to late stages. This change is a non-linear change, but in general, children's critical thinking is progressing, and this progress is slower in the later stages. (2) There are differences in the structural characteristics of children's critical thinking skills by gender, but this difference is not significant.