Bridging the Gap between Preparatory Classes and Freshman Courses in Higher Education

This paper aims to introduce the integration of a new component into a preparatory year course that allows students both to develop critical thinking and academic writing skills, and cope with social science freshman courses at a higher education institute in Turkey. Today, in most European countries, a significant increase has been observed in English medium universities, which generally convey knowledge using a Western discourse pattern. Therefore, when asked to cope with academic writing which requires bringing multiple skills together such as researching, reading, annotating, critical thinking, analyzing, corroborating different resources and referencing, a considerable burden is placed on students’ shoulders, causing a significant level of struggle. In order to fill the afore mentioned gap, and allow preparatory year students a smoother and substantial transition to freshman courses, in the preparatory year we implement a separate course entitled Critical Thinking for Social Sciences (CTSS). In this study we will detail the CTSS course method, describe its implementation into the preparatory year program and share the results of feedback collected via one-to-one interviews with students who took CTSS during the last academic year and who are now taking Social and Political Science.