Does explicit teaching of critical thinking improve critical thinking skills of English language learners in higher education? A critical review of causal evidence

This paper presents the results of a systematic review of international studies to establish whether explicit teaching of critical thinking is effective in enhancing the critical thinking skills of English language learners in higher education and to identify the most promising approaches. A search of 12 electronic databases supplemented by other sources yielded more than 1794 studies. Only 36 met the pre-defined inclusion and exclusion criteria. A range of approaches were tested and almost all claimed to be effective, but only explicit instruction in general critical thinking skills was found to have the best evidence of effectiveness. However, because most of the studies were small-scale and/or methodologically flawed, the evidence is not strong enough to be conclusive. Evidence for the other approaches was even weaker. These findings suggest that research in this field is still rather immature and more large-scale, replicable robust studies are needed to advance the field.     

Religious doctrines and critical religious education: teachers’ epistemic switching in a confessional setting

The purpose of the present article is twofold: first, to examine whether epistemic switching is documented in the context of religious education; and second, if it is, to show the challenges as well as the strategies that teachers utilise when they engage in epistemic switching. The context of our study is religious education in the Greek-Cypriot educational system – an example of a confessional setting in which Greek Orthodox Christianity is the only religion being taught in schools. This article describes a qualitative case study research – which is part of a larger, 1-year project – that explores the understandings of religion and interculturalism as well as the pedagogical perspectives on religious education of six Greek-Cypriot primary school teachers. The findings show how the possibilities and obstacles of teachers’ epistemic switching could inform larger debates concerning the entanglements between critical religious education pedagogies and religious doctrines, especially within confessional educational contexts.     

Training higher education teachers’ critical thinking and attitudes towards teaching it

Teachers play a crucial role in attaining a major objective of higher education: fostering students’ critical thinking (CT). Yet, little is known about how to foster teachers’ own CT-skills and attitudes towards teaching CT. In a quasi-experimental study (N = 54), we investigated whether a three-session teacher training on (teaching) CT (n = 32) positively affected higher education teachers’ CT-skills and their attitudes towards teaching CT compared to a control condition (n = 22). The training consisted of explicit instruction on common reasoning biases combined with assignments focused on the teaching practice. Results showed that the training improved teachers’ performance on trained but not on novel CT-tasks. Also teachers’ ability to detect biases in a written student product improved; however, despite a small improvement, they still had difficulties in correctly explaining those biases. Possibly due to ceiling effects the training did not affect perceived relevance of teaching CT. Finally, perceived competence in teaching CT decreased temporarily after the first training session but this negative effect disappeared after the final third session. Future research should investigate ways to promote teachers’ ability to transfer trained skills to other CT-tasks, their ability provide feedback on students’ reasoning (i.e., bias explanation), and their attitudes towards teaching CT.     

Students’ and teachers’ perspectives about quality of engineering education in Portugal

Quality in higher education is a subject of increasing importance. This idea can be supported by looking at different sources, namely, the scientific literature, national and transnational governments’ policies, such as those emerging from the Bologna Process. Also, the internationalisation of higher education and, within it, students’ and staff mobility among institutions, has brought to the agenda the quality issue, particularly with regard to the teaching and learning process. Several authors argue that the meaning of quality depends on who defines it. This article focuses on a study that looks at how teachers and students in higher education institutions, in Portugal and in the domain of Engineering, see the quality issue. Data was collected through interviews to teachers (six) and students (38) in two different Portuguese institutions. The results indicate that, although teachers and students refer to the same dimensions that influence quality, they have different perspectives about their importance. From the point of view of the authors, this discrepancy requires some pedagogical actions in the context where the study was developed and, also, further research to see if the same tendency exists in different settings.     

Developing a critical consciousness of race in place-based environmental education: Franco’s story

Environmental education (EE) has a history of support for critical place-based pedagogy as a means of learning through engagement in space, both cultural and biophysical. In this paper I tell the story of how Franco – a non-white, non-American undergraduate – engaged with local discourses in a watershed-focused EE program in the rural Midwestern US. I examine how the five tenets of critical race theory (CRT) can be used to interpret Franco’s experience, where he encountered multiple instances of racism and xenophobia. I argue that without a critical analysis of race in place-based EE programs, instructors may (a) privilege their own ways of knowing in local settings, (b) rely on ‘grit’ narratives as mechanisms for mediation of racism, and (c) send non-white students home having learned that they cannot effect meaningful change for sustainability. I conclude with recommendations for faculty in predominantly white institutions on how CRT might foster the development of critical consciousness of race in place-based EE programs.     

Higher education marketing – does inducing anxiety facilitate critical thinking or more consumerism?

Consumerism acts to maintain the emotional reversal of work and family. Exposed to a continual bombardment of advertisements through a daily average of three hours of television (half of all their leisure time), workers are persuaded to ‘need’ more things. To buy what they now need, they need money. To earn money, they work longer hours. Being away from home so many hours, they make up for their absence at home with gifts that cost money. They materialize love. And so the cycle continues [Baumann, Z. (2007). Collateral casualties of consumerism. Journal of Consumer Culture, 7, 1].     

Human-material relationships in environmental and sustainability education – an empirical study of a school embroidery project

In recent discussions about the widening and opening up of anthropocentric perspectives in environmental and sustainability education (ESE) research, a recurrent issue has been what reasonably could be a subject of inquiry and an agent of knowledge. This article aims to showcase an empirical study of the relevance of human-material relationships in crafting learning processes by following an embroidery project with year 8 students in the Swedish craft subject of educational sloyd. How the human-material correspondence unfolds in the crafting learning process is analysed with the aid of Ingold’s practice of correspondence and Sørensen’s notion of participation, performance and imagination. Rather than assuming that materials contribute to certain environmental and sustainability aims, the analysis empirically demonstrates how the human-material correspondence unfolds. The analysis identifies three human-material relationships: attuning, troubling and tracing correspondence. Drawing on the findings, the human-material relevance for environmental and sustainability education and research is further discussed.     

Demands and design principles of a “heterodox” didactics for promoting critical thinking in higher education

Higher Education - Following on from the already wide-ranging academic discussion about fostering critical thinking in students as an important component of a university’s educational...     

Teaching science or cultivating values? Conservation NGOs and environmental education in Costa Rica

A key ongoing debate in environmental education practice and its research relates to the content and goals of environmental education programmes. Specifically, there is a long history of debate between advocates of educational perspectives that emphasise the teaching of science concepts and those that seek to more actively link environmental and social issues. In practice, educators and organisations respond to these tensions in a variety of ways, often strongly reflecting the particular social and economic contexts in which they are located. Much of the research in the area, however, has tended to take a narrow focus on either purely theoretical concerns or on individual programmes in schools or protected areas. In contrast, this research used an ethnographic approach to explore debates about the content and aims of educational programmes between diverse educational actors in one community in Costa Rica. The research revealed that environmental education: (i) is an important local site for the active contestation of understandings of the natural world and humans’ relationships to it; and (ii) can be part of wider struggles over the control of processes of local development and environmental management. The study further suggests that while theoretical discussion about the relative merits of diverse approaches to environmental teaching and learning is important, if that analysis is not situated within a particular social, economic and political context, it is likely to reveal relatively little about how or why particular perspectives on environmental education may dominate or remain marginal in a specific place.     

Students’ Levels of Understanding Models and Modelling in Biology: Global or Aspect-Dependent?

It is argued that knowledge about models is an important part of a profound understanding of Nature of Science. Consequently, researchers have developed different ‘levels of understanding’ to analyse students’, teachers’, or experts’ comprehension of this topic. In some approaches, global levels of understanding have been developed which mirror the idea of an understanding of models and modelling as a whole. Opposed to this, some authors have developed levels of understanding for distinct aspects concerning models and modelling in science (i.e. aspect-dependent levels). This points to an important issue for science education research since global conceptualisations might lead to less differentiated assessments and interventions than aspect-dependent ones. To contribute to this issue, the article summarises conceptualisations of both global and aspect-dependent levels of understanding models and modelling that have been developed in science education. Further, students’ understanding of the aspects nature of models, multiple models, purpose of models, testing models, and changing models has been assessed (N?=?1,180; 11 to 19 years old; secondary schools; Berlin, Germany). It is discussed to what extent the data support the notion of global or aspect-dependent levels of understanding models and modelling in science. The results suggest that students seem to have a complex and at least partly inconsistent pattern of understanding models. Furthermore, students with high nonverbal intelligence and good marks seem to have a comparatively more consistent and more elaborated understanding of models and modelling than weaker students. Recommendations for assessment in science education research and teaching practice are made.     

Patterns and purposes in the uses and misuses of the term ‘critical thinking’ in the social sciences

This article analyses the uses and representations of the term “critical thinking” in the social science literature, based on a qualitative content analysis of titles, abstracts and keywords retrieved from the SCOPUS database for Germany, France and Russia over the last two decades. Our analysis focuses on how the use of the term “critical thinking” has increased over time, in which contexts the term is used and in which part of article texts it is used. Our findings are counterintuitive on several levels. First, the term “critical thinking” is seldom used in a pluri-disciplinary context. More commonly, it is used within specific discourses—notably education. Second, we found that it is mainly used instrumentally, rather than analytically. Third, most of the articles that use the term do not engage in actual critical analysis. There are also important geographic variation in the use of the term. In articles from Germany and Russia the term is used in similar ways—and differently in France. These nuances are difficult to analyse however, due to the different topics addressed, as well as author preferences. The use of the term “critical thinking” is diverse; indeed, at times weak and paradoxical. Finally, we discuss how editorial policy in academic journals possibly influences the discourse on critical thinking.     

Students’ meaning-making and sense-making of vocational knowledge in Dutch senior secondary vocational education

Meaning-making and sense-making are generally assumed to be part of students’ personal vocational knowledge development, since they contribute to both students’ socialisation in a vocation and students’ personalisation of concepts, values and beliefs regarding that vocation. However, how students in vocational education acquire meaning and make sense of vocational knowledge is not explained. Furthermore, examples of what these processes entail in the context of vocational education are lacking. A multiple case study was performed to explore students’ meaning-making and sense-making in classroom interactions in Dutch senior secondary vocational education. Our results show that meaning-making is a process in which students interpret vocational knowledge by explicating and clarifying this knowledge. Sense-making is perceived to be a process in which students concretise vocational knowledge by testing and justifying this knowledge. A research model was developed to describe how students make meaning and sense of vocational knowledge in interaction with practitioners.     

An interdisciplinary approach to environmental and sustainability education: developing geography students’ understandings of sustainable development using poetry

Education for sustainable development (ESD) persists as an important concept within international policy and yet, despite considerable debate, there remains a lack of consensus as to a pedagogy for ESD in schools. This paper presents findings from a study investigating how an interdisciplinary approach to ESD in England developed one class of 16- and 17-year-old geography students’ understandings of sustainability. The research used students’ drawings of sustainable cities alongside questionnaires and semi-structured interviews to explore their understanding of sustainable development within a constructivist, case study framework. The study found that the use of poetry within a geography lesson developed students’ appreciation of the social and economic dimensions of sustainability, although their focus persisted around the environmental. As such, it is argued that an interdisciplinary approach to ESD encourages students to engage more critically and affectively with the concept of sustainable development, thereby developing a more holistic appreciation of it.     

Young people’s conversations about environmental and sustainability issues in social media

Young people’s conversations about environmental and sustainability issues in social media and their educational implications are under-researched. Understanding young people’s meaning-making in social media and the experiences they acquire could help teachers to stage pluralistic and participatory approaches to classroom discussions about the environment and sustainability. The aim of the article is to explore the characteristics of meaning-making in young people’s conversations about environmental and sustainability issue in social media, more precisely in an online community. The study takes a public pedagogy and citizenship-as-practice approach and uses Epistemological Move Analysis. The conversation are shown to be argumentative, sophisticated, elaborative and competitive and create an educational situation in which facts about the world and moral and political values and interests are confronted and argued. The findings raise questions about pluralistic and participatory approaches and the staging of classroom conversations in environmental and sustainability education.     

Teachers’ conceptions of quality and organisational values in higher education: compliance or enhancement?

Teachers are often assumed to have a negative attitude towards quality endeavours of their institutions and to hold defensive organisational values. However, there is little empirical research on this issue. This study focuses on teachers’ conceptions of quality, on their preferred organisational values and on the relationships between the two. A written questionnaire was presented to the teaching staff from 18 departments of universities of applied sciences in the Netherlands (N?=?266). It comprised 18 questions about teachers’ conceptions of quality, representing two quality scales: compliance and accountability and enhancement and improvement. A further 24 questions, related to organisational values, represent two scales that typify flexible organisations, and two that typify control-oriented organisations. The results reveal a neutral score on the compliance and accountability conceptions of quality and on the control-oriented organisational values, and a high score on enhancement and improvement and on the flexibility-oriented values. Both pairs appear to be moderately positively correlated. Despite the need for further qualitative research, it can be concluded that teachers perceive quality first and foremost as enhancement and improvement, rather than as compliance to external standards and accountability. These findings offer interesting perspectives for the further development of an internal quality culture in higher education.