Critical Thinking in College Freshmen: The Impact of Secondary and Higher Education

Abstract

Critical thinking helps students to confront a multitude of challenges they will face in their carreers and personal lives. It is therefore an important task of higher education to promote students' critical thinking. However, students do not enter higher education as a blank slate. Background characteristics of students are important in developing instruction. The present study investigates the influence of an important background characteristic, namely students' secondary education, and their current higher education programme on critical thinking in the first year of higher education. The critical thinking of college freshmen was measured by the Scipio, a test consisting of both constructed response items and forced choice items. The results indicate that (1) the growth in critical thinking during the first year of higher education is on average small, (2) students with a background in general secondary education have higher entrance performances and show more growth during the first year than students with other educational backgrounds, (3) critical thinking plays a role in the educational choice that students make when they enter higher education, and (4) students in a professional bachelor programme grow more in CT during the first year of higher education than students in an academic bachelor programme.

Translation, adaptation, and validation of the Halpern Critical Thinking Assessment to Portugal: Effect of disciplinary area and academic level on critical thinking

“…On the other hand, disciplinary differences could be due to individual characteristics that impact when time comes to enroll in a particular course from a certain disciplinary area (Badcock et al, 2010), seeing that neurocognitive systems, in interaction with life experiences, are responsible for individual differences in CT (Bolger, Mackey, Wang, & Grigorenko, 2014). Also, it is necessary to account for the impact of educational background, as suggested by Evens, Verburgh, and Elen (2013), who found that Secondary Education impacts the choice of disciplinary area, which relates to students' CT performance. Overall, CT differences may be mostly due to pedagogical practices, so "educators will need to study the practices of exemplary instructors rather than exemplary disciplines, because no disciplines appear to stand out in this domain" (Brint et al, 2012, p. 22).…”

The Development of Critical Thinking in Professional and Academic Bachelor Programmes

“…Furthermore, in the literature no differences in CT development across higher education programmes are reported. Evens, Verburgh, and Elen (2013) found differences in CT development during the first year of higher education between Flemish professional and academic bachelor students. Professional bachelor programmes prepare students for the labour market.…”

“…The design of the study is visualized in Figure 1. Separate analyses were done for professional and academic bachelor programmes because there are differences in growth between the first years of both programme types (Evens et al, 2013). In order to facilitate comparability between the academic and the professional programmes, only bachelor students were included in the sample.…”

Profile of Junior High School Students' Critical Thinking Skills in Answering Questions Related to Biological Concepts

“…Additionally, individuals with critical thinking skill are deemed much easier and flexible to adapt and overcome any situations where information seems to develop very fast (Dwyer, Hogan, & Stewart, 2014). Critical thinking skill also helps students cope with numerous challenges that somehow occur in their personal and career life in the future (Evens, Verburgh, & Elen, 2013). For that reason, empowering critical thinking skill will get students prepared to deal with unpredictable development as it happens today (Scott, 2015).…”