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

By Nada El Soufi, B. See. Studies in Educational Evaluation, 2019

166 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract 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.

Subfields: Education

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/41e69401d9c74a63e9a6f42f21737c7c7b48e084

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

  1. Chunpeng Zhai
  2. Santoso Wibowo
  3. Lily D. Li

Citations in the corpus