The goal of this study is to investigate university students’ representation on their critical thinking in academic writing from a critical literacy perspective, in which text is bias and it possesses ideological perspective of writer in expressing social critics, inequality, and power relations. Researchers analyzed 91 argumentative texts writing from Indonesian undergraduate English education students, which were qualitatively assessed using Facione’s HCTSR and LaGuardia’ s CLR rubrics, as well as NVivo 12 Plus software and an integrated theme meaning approach to qualitative content analysis. Researchers discovered that students’ critical thinking skills varied in demonstrating their logical arguments, systematic thinking in reasoning, analysis and evaluation, decision-making, and problem-solving strategies in their academic writing in higher education.

The purpose of this qualitative study is to investigate, classify, and analyse critical thinking in student's writing argumentative essays. The method used in this research is qualitative content analysis using the approach of Facione’s (2009) holistic critical thinking scoring rubric (HCTSR). Data collection technique used in this study is by document observation of English education department students’ blog-texts about teacher’s welfare in Indonesia, in one of private universities in West Jawa, Indonesia. Data obtained are from students’ writing emails submissions tasks; then, the data are analyzed by the researcher qualitatively based on coding frame document of writing. The results of this study indicate that in the the level of student’s critical thinking in writing varies demonstrated by the students.