Critical thinking in practice: The priorities and practices of instructors teaching in higher education
Introduction
The idea that ‘knowledge is power’ is quite simply not enough in today's ever-changing world (Pellegrino & Hilton, 2012). Instead, individuals need to think critically in order to adapt to unfamiliar situations and to prevent the spread of misinformation, as the pace of change continues to accelerate and the complexity of work and the world around us intensifies (Bakhshi, Downing, Osborne, & Schneider, 2017; Barak, Ben-Chaim, & Zoller, 2007; Zucker, 2019). Being able to think critically has been shown to be a strong predictor of academic achievement in children and adults and successful life decisions in general (Butler, Pentoney, & Bong, 2017; Ren, Tong, Peng, & Wang, 2020).
Developing critical thinking in university students is becoming an increasingly expected as well as desired outcome of higher education (Facione, 2013; Halx & Reybold, 2005; Jackson, 2010; Moore, 2013; Pithers & Soden, 2000; Tsui, 2002). In recent years universities around the world have prioritised its teaching (Bezanilla, Fernandez-Nogueira, Poblete, & Galindo-Domınguez, 2019). Yet despite this interest in critical thinking higher education institutions are not necessarily seeing improvements in this area. For example, national assessments both in the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States (US) have shown that critical thinking is not improving substantively among university students (Arum & Roksa, 2011; Pithers & Soden, 2000; Willingham, 2008; but also see Huber & Kuncel, 2016). This concern over a lack of critical thinking proficiency is echoed in industry; a recent survey reported that US employers do not believe that most graduates possess the critical thinking skills needed for workforce success, and only 39% were very well prepared (Association of American Colleges and Universities, 2021). Unsurprisingly, given such findings, the demand for tertiary education systems to do more to improve the levels of critical thinking among students and close the ‘skills gap’ is growing (Facione, 2013; Jackson, 2010; Moore, 2013; NACE, 2017; Pithers & Soden, 2000).
Most research to date has focused on the theorising of critical thinking in higher education; that is, how should critical thinking be defined and taught to support university students (Moore, 2013). In contrast, only a handful of studies have examined how critical thinking is taught in practice at universities (e.g. Bezanilla, Fernandez-Nogueira, Poblete, & Galindo-Domínguez, 2019; Duro, Elander, Maratos, Stupple, & Aubeeluck, 2013; Halx & Reybold, 2005). These studies tend to take a qualitative approach to understand instructors’ views from the ground up, rather than a more structured top-down approach asking instructors about critical thinking as it is understood in the research literature. In the present study, we contribute to bridging the gap between the research literature and teaching practice on the ground. We carried out a survey to understand how university instructors from different subjects in the humanities and social sciences teach critical thinking skills in the UK and the US and how they prioritise specific skills identified by researchers. In what follows, we provide a brief overview of how critical thinking has been defined and taught according to academic research.
Modern interest in critical thinking stems from the 1990s, when there was a flurry of activity by researchers to try and define critical thinking (Facione, 1990; McPeck, 1990; Paul, 1993). Notable definitions of critical thinking come from the work of Philosopher John Dewey who defined it as “the kind of thinking that consists in turning a subject over in the mind and giving it serious consecutive consideration” (Dewey, 1933, p. 3), as well as the work of a cross-disciplinary panel of experts led by Psychologist Peter Facione who provided a consensus definition: “purposeful, self-regulatory judgement which results in interpretation, analysis, evaluation, and inference, as well as explanation of the evidential, conceptual, methodological, criteriological or contextual considerations upon which that judgement is based” (Facione, 1990, p. 2). In 1998, Griggs and colleagues summarised 25 different definitions of critical thinking as “a process of evaluating evidence for certain claims, determining whether presented conclusions logically follow from the evidence, and considering alternative explanations” (Griggs, Jackson, Marek, & Christopher, 1998, p. 256). But despite concentrated efforts to define critical thinking no universal definition exists, and in fact these ‘standard definitions’ are often perceived as being too abstract to be practically meaningful (Duro, Elander, Maratos, Stupple, & Aubeeluck, 2013).
Notwithstanding the high volume of definitions and the concerns over their lack of precision, there is agreement about the key characteristics of critical thinking. For instance, critical thinking can either be a cognitive skill or a dispositional characteristic that can be taught at a subject-specific or a general level (Ennis, 1989; Facione, 1990; McPeck, 1990). Linked to this, there is an on-going debate in the literature regarding the extent to which critical thinking can be taught within specific subjects versus whether it can be taught as a separate ‘standalone’ subject, with many researchers arguing that in order to master critical thinking it must be taught within a specific subject (Lai, 2011; Pellegrino & Hilton, 2012).
Academic researchers, especially those specialising in healthcare and psychology, have been particularly interested in the development of the skills component of critical thinking (Ku, 2009; Sharples et al., 2017). This in turn has led to the creation of a number of skills-based frameworks and taxonomies defining specific critical thinking skills. An early example is Bloom's Taxonomy of Learning Objectives, where evaluation, analysis, synthesis, and application were identified as higher-order thinking skills (Bloom, 1956). Another framework, based on the work led by Facione (1990), identified evaluation, analysis, inference, deductive reasoning, and inductive reasoning as key critical thinking skills. These sets of skills have been applied across a number of disciplines and professions, including nursing (Colucciello, 1997). A third framework was created by Beth Black (2012) for the purpose of higher education admissions tests, and included skills such as analysis, evaluation, and inference. A fourth and final framework created by Dwyer, Hogan, and Steward (2014) similarly identified analysis, evaluation, and inference. Crucially, what these four frameworks all have in common is that they identify the same types of critical thinking skills and provide similar definitions for each skill (see Black, 2012; Bloom, 1956; Dwyer, Hogan, & Stewart, 2014; Facione, 1990;). It remains a somewhat open question how these skills are perceived across different disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, and how much consensus there is on their relative importance. The present study examined this by surveying a range of subjects.
Regardless of how critical thinking has been conceptualised, several approaches exist to support its teaching (Ennis, 1989; Larsson, 2017). These approaches include ‘general’, ‘infusion’, ‘immersion’, and ‘mixed’. The general approach explicitly teaches critical thinking as a separate course outside of a specific subject. The infusion approach explicitly teaches both subject content and critical thinking skills, where the critical thinking instruction is taught in the context of a specific subject. The immersion approach also teaches critical thinking within a specific subject, but it is taught implicitly as opposed to explicitly. This approach assumes that critical thinking will be a consequence of interacting with and learning about the subject matter. Lastly, the mixed approach is an amalgamation of the other three approaches where critical thinking is taught as a general subject alongside either the infusion or immersion approach in the context of a specific subject. Studies show that explicitly teaching critical thinking within a subject (i.e. infusion) is the most effective approach for developing critical thinking (Abrami et al., 2008). More recently, there have been efforts by researchers to understand what types of activities can be used to support the teaching of critical thinking and these have included activities such as dialogue and authentic instruction (see Abrami et al., 2015). However, the extent to which these different approaches and activities are used in practice to support the teaching of critical thinking at university remains to be seen. To address this the present study surveyed instructors on their practices.
In this section, we review the existing literature on how critical thinking is defined and taught by instructors at university. Most of the research that we examined (e.g. Allison, 2019; Duro, Elander, Maratos, Stupple, & Aubeeluck, 2013; Halx & Reybold, 2005) was qualitative, asking instructors open-ended questions without providing them with definitions of critical thinking skills, or naming approaches or activities as defined by critical thinking research (e.g. Abrami et al., 2008; 2015). As such these explorations, whilst capturing instructors’ perspectives about critical thinking did not easily map on to current theory . In some cases, the open-endedness of the approaches led to instructors not being able to effectively articulate their needs and priorities for teaching critical thinking. For example, Halx and Reybold (2005) looked at faculty perceptions of critical thinking in a small liberal arts college in the US. They conducted semi-structured interviews with eight instructors from the social sciences, natural sciences, humanities, and arts. An important finding from this study was that instructors were unclear about exactly what abilities they should be developing in students, with most of the instructors teaching critical thinking based on their own definitions and crucially they did not feel trained to teach critical thinking. The importance of the location of the institution and institutional culture was also highlighted in this study, but with the data only being based on one private liberal arts university in the US wider comparisons were not possible. In the present study we included a sample from UK and US higher education institutions to explore whether our findings would generalise beyond one country setting.
Similarly, another study conducted interviews and focus groups with four instructors and 26 students from a psychology department in the UK and reported that critical thinking was “an intuitive concept, that was difficult to explain explicitly” (Duro, Elander, Maratos, Stupple, & Aubeeluck, 2013, p. 14). This lack of clarity about critical thinking was also echoed in a survey with lecturers from an agricultural college in the US (Stedman & Adams, 2012). Collectively, these studies show that despite some consensus in the theoretical literature, there appears to be a lack of understanding about how to define critical thinking in UK and US universities. This is interesting given that both the UK and the US are often focal points for critical thinking research, with institutions regularly citing critical thinking as an essential learning outcome of undergraduate study (Association of American Colleges and Universities, 2005; Quality Assurance Agency, 2018). Further research is needed to understand how critical thinking is defined and taught by university instructors in these two countries, and the extent to which these practices align with theoretical frameworks from the academic research. The latter point here requires a top-down approach such as the one we adopt in the present study, surveying instructors about specific aspects of critical thinking identified by prior research rather than open-endedly.
Studies show that the subject discipline also matters when it comes to understanding critical thinking. For example, Allison (2019) examined 17 UK instructors’ views on critical thinking from the following subjects: education, environmental science, medicine, and law and criminology. It was found that environmental science was associated with interpreting and analysing information, education with analysing arguments, and medicine with professionalism and decision-making. Yet despite different definitions, the types of methods used to teach critical thinking were similar across subjects (e.g. questioning techniques, class discussions). However, from observations the actual application and effectiveness of these methods varied by subject. This shows that critical thinking needs to be researched within specific subject disciplines to ensure that research in this area can have practical applications (Moore, 2013; Piergiovanni, 2014).
Many of the studies described previously have focused on instructors’ own definitions, understandings, and beliefs about critical thinking in the UK and the US across a range of subjects. These personal perspectives gained through qualitative data show that often there is a lack of understanding about how to define and teach critical thinking when instructors are asked to engage with this topic based solely on their teaching experiences. Integrating academic research with practitioners’ lived teaching experiences has also been emphasised by Bezanilla and colleagues (2019). In their study, they combined a literature review of evidence-based activities for critical thinking and university teachers’ descriptions of the activities they used to teach critical thinking. These descriptions were gathered in an open-ended format. The teachers’ responses were then interpreted in light of previous academic research. In the present study, we build on previous research to continue to bridge the gap between research and teaching practice. We used a top-down approach starting from the research literature to define specific aspects of critical thinking and teaching practices that have previously been identified. We then surveyed instructors on how they use these.
The aim of the present study is to understand the priorities and current teaching practices of instructors when teaching critical thinking. Specifically, we asked instructors which critical thinking skills drawn from the research literature they consider most important in their subjects and what approaches and activities they used to teach critical thinking. Previous studies have asked instructors open-ended questions about how they define critical thinking. We built on this by providing instructors with definitions of critical thinking skills based on academic research and asking them to judge the relative importance of these skills in their subjects. In addition, we asked instructors to categorise their teaching practices for critical thinking based on evidence-informed approaches and activities drawn from previous research.
Previous studies reviewed earlier suggest that subject discipline may or may not matter when it comes to teaching critical thinking (e.g. Allison, 2019). In our study, we examine a range of subjects in the humanities and social sciences to understand whether instructors teaching in these subjects differ in their critical thinking priorities and teaching practices. Much of the critical thinking research has been carried out in these areas and thus many of the existing definitions, approaches, and activities apply to the humanities and social sciences (Bensley & Spero, 2014; McLaughlin & McGill, 2017; Stupple et al., 2017). The humanities and social sciences are highly sought-after courses at UK and US universities so understanding exactly how critical thinking applies to these subjects is of interest to institutions located in these countries specifically (QS World University Rankings, 2021). We recognise that critical thinking is, of course, necessary in other subjects as well including the natural sciences and vocational subjects, especially nursing and medicine (Carvalho et al., 2017), but these other subjects are beyond the scope of the present work. Without strong hypotheses about which subject would rate specific critical thinking skills in which ways, we included a range of humanities and social sciences subjects to explore whether there were substantial differences between subjects: history, philosophy, political science, psychology, and sociology. We also included instructors from both the UK and the US to explore whether we could generalise the findings beyond just one country setting.
Overall, the present study addresses the following two research questions:
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Which critical thinking skills do instructors prioritise in their subject, and does this vary depending on the subject or country that the higher education institution is situated in?
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How is critical thinking taught in higher education, and does this vary depending on the subject or country that the higher education institution is situated in?
Section snippets
Participants
Participants included instructors who taught at least one of the following subjects at university: history, philosophy, political science, psychology, and sociology. They were recruited as an opportunity sample volunteering to take part in an anonymous online survey about critical thinking. The initial data collection from the survey took place in March 2015 via SurveyMonkey (n = 87). In February 2019, due to further research funding, the online survey was re-opened to collect data from
The prioritisation of critical thinking skills in higher education
Descriptive analysis was used to give an overview of how the 176 instructors ranked the ten critical thinking skills. The mean rank and standard deviation of each of the skill's perceived level of importance is shown in Table 2. The results show that, on average, the critical thinking skills that are considered most important for teaching (i.e. ranked number 1) are analysis, evaluation, and interpretation and the critical thinking skills that are considered least important for teaching (i.e.
Discussion
The present study shows that university instructors across the humanities and social sciences consider analysis, evaluation, and interpretation to be the most important critical thinking skills. Specifically, instructors in psychology, sociology, and political sciences ranked analysis – being able to examine ideas/information and identify arguments and reasons – as most important, as did instructors in philosophy. However, unlike the previous three subjects, the difference between the rankings
Conclusions
This study used the conceptual framing of existing research on critical thinking to take a quantitative look at how UK and US university instructors in the humanities and social sciences defined and taught critical thinking. This was achieved by getting instructors to rank the importance of ten critical thinking skills in the teaching of their subject based on skills and definitions from academic research (Facione, 1990). As well as by getting instructors to identify which evidence-informed
Funding
This work was supported by Macat International Limited and the US-UK Fulbright Commission.
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Lauren Bellaera: Conceptualisation, Investigation, Formal analysis, Writing – Original Draft. Yana Weinstein-Jones: Writing – Review & Editing. Sonia Ilie: Formal analysis. Sara T. Baker: Conceptualisation, Writing – Review & Editing.
Declarations of competing interest
None.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank all the university instructors from the UK and US who took part in this research. We would also like to thank Shannon Rowley for her support with the coding of some of the survey data.
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Permanent address: The Brilliant Club, Millbank Tower, 21–24 Millbank, London, SW1P 4QP, UK.
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The co-author: Yana Weinstein-Jones would like to be indentified as an Independent Scholar (not associated with any HE institution).