Critical thinking development in higher education
Loading...
Date
2023
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
The labour market is rapidly evolving due to technological advances, provoking the need of workers to prepare for this change. The "21st Century Skills" emerged as an answer to this context, proposing skills such as critical thinking, among others, that could help prepare workers for this new scenario. The development of critical thinking has been consistently studied in higher education. However, critical thinking has not been able to develop successfully in technical and vocational education and training since there is a focus on the acquisition of practical skills. In Chile, where technical and vocational education and training is a potential avenue for social mobility, it's crucial to develop critical thinking skills among students, considering the significant impact they will have on the future job market. This research contributes on how to develop critical thinking in higher education. Critical thinking was defined as a taxonomy of the sub-skills of interpretation, analysis, inference, evaluation, argumentation, and metacognition. From this definition, a procedure to develop critical thinking assessment instruments for specific cultures was developed by creating three different instruments which were validated in different higher education institutions from Chile and Taiwan. This allowed to create different assessment instruments, that were later used in a technical and vocational education and training institution in Chile to prove if a methodology to develop critical thinking was successful or not. Additionally, a study of the relation between peer assessment and self-assessment (widely recognized activities to develop critical thinking) was done in a higher education institution in Chile when developing critical thinking. The contributions of this thesis are: 1. Developed a procedure to create culture-dependent critical thinking assessment instruments, enhancing the accuracy of assessments across various cultural contexts. 2. Demonstrated that instruments created from this procedure are equivalent internally, enabling their use in pre- and post-test settings across different research contexts. 3. Designed a class methodology that effectively fosters critical thinking within technical and vocational education and training, with potential for application across various contexts in this type of education. 4. Identified discussion and real-world topics as key strategies for enhancing critical thinking development within technical and vocational education and training. 5. Validated empirically the positive impact of peer assessment and self-assessment on the development of critical thinking. 6. Validated empirically that peer assessment has a bigger impact than self-assessment on the development of critical thinking.
Description
Tesis (Doctor in Engineering Sciences)--Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, 2023.
Keywords
Critical thinking, Higher education, Technical and vocational education and training, Assessment, Peer assessment, Self-assessment