Effects of Self-Explaining on Learning and Transfer of Critical Thinking Skills

Abstract

Critical thinking is considered to be an important competence for students and graduates of higher education. Yet, it is largely unclear which teaching methods are most effective in supporting the acquisition of critical thinking skills, especially regarding one important aspect of critical thinking: avoiding biased reasoning. The present study examined whether creating desirable difficulties in instruction by prompting students to generate explanations of a problem-solution to themselves (i.e., self-explaining) is effective for fostering learning and transfer of unbiased reasoning. Seventy-nine first-year students of a Dutch Applied University of Sciences were first instructed on two categories of "heuristics and biases" tasks (syllogism and base-rate or Wason and conjunction). Thereafter, they practiced these either with (self-explaining condition) or without (no self-explaining condition) self-explanation prompts that asked them to motivate their answers. Performance was measured on a pretest, immediate posttest, and delayed (2 weeks later) posttest on all four task categories, to examine effects on learning (performance on practiced tasks) and transfer (performance on non-practiced tasks). Participants' learning and transfer performance improved to a comparable degree from pretest to immediate posttest in both conditions, and this higher level of performance was retained on the delayed posttest. Surprisingly, self-explanation prompts had a negative effect on posttest performance on practiced tasks when those were Wason and conjunction tasks, and self-explaining had no effect on transfer performance. These findings suggest that the benefits of explicit instruction and practice on learning and transfer of unbiased reasoning cannot be enhanced by increasing the difficulty of the practice tasks through self-explaining.

Learning to avoid biased reasoning: effects of interleaved practice and worked examples

“…Moreover, several tasks were taken from previous studies that were conducted in similar contexts (i.e. within an existing CT-course with first-year or second-year students of a university of applied sciences; Heijltjes et al, 2014a;Heijltjes et al, 2014bHeijltjes et al, , 2015 and even within the same study domain (Van Peppen et al, 2018).…”

“…The power of Experiment 1under a fixed alpha level of 0.05 and with a correlation between measures of 0.3 (e.g. Van Peppen et al, 2018) is estimated at .24 for detecting a small interaction effect (h 2 p = .01), .96 for a medium interaction effect (h 2 p = .06), and > .99 for a large interaction effect (h 2 p = .14). Thus, the power of our experiment should be sufficient to pick up medium-sized interaction effects, which is in line with the moderate overall positive effect of interleaved practice of previous studies as indicated in a recent meta-analysis (g = 0.42; Brunmair & Richter, 2019).…”

“…The power of analysis 1 (n = 117)under a fixed alpha level of 0.05 and with a correlation between measures of 0.3 (e.g. Van Peppen et al, 2018) is estimated at .20 for detecting a small interaction effect (h 2 p = .01), .93 for a medium interaction effect (h 2 p = .06), and > .99 for a large interaction effect (h 2 p = .14). Under the same assumptions, the power of analysis 2 (n = 89) is estimated at .17 for detecting a small interaction effect (h 2 p = .01), .82 for a medium interaction effect (h 2 p = .06), and > .99 for a large interaction effect (h 2 p = .14).…”

“…However, it is not yet clear what teaching methods are most effective, especially to establish transfer (e.g. Van Peppen et al, 2018;Heijltjes et al, 2014a;Heijltjes et al, 2014bHeijltjes et al, , 2015, which refers to the ability to apply acquired knowledge and skills in new situations (Halpern, 1998;Perkins & Salomon, 1992).…”

The Correlation between Critical Thinking Skills and Cognitive Learning Outcomes

“…Thus, critical thinking requires a high level of abstract and logical thinking and a commitment or habit of thinking to meet the standards and principles of good critical thinking. Such skills are defined as reflective and reasoned ways of thinking that are focused on deciding what the individuals believe and can do (van Peppen et al, 2018). Delphi's consensus involving various experts managed to discuss about CTS as the purpose of assessment and learning.…”