Summary: The Importance Of Critical Thinking In Higher Education

Linda Lalicata

Week six summaries

Liu, O.L., Mao, L., Frankel, L., & Xu, J. (2016). Assessing critical thinking in higher education: The HEIghten approach and preliminary validity evidence. Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 41(5), 677-694. Doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2016.1168358 This paper is based on a correlational study that tested the validity of the HEIghten approach to assessing critical thinking in college students. The authors addressed the issue of the importance of critical thinking as a learning outcome. They felt that there is a deficiency in the way critical thinking is assessed and reviewed current methods and then introduced the HEIghten method principals; they then conducted a pilot study on this test and the

They addressed the problems that were present in previous assessment tools and as a result, two forms of the test were created, and they launched the assessment; they plan to use the data when it is available to run their analysis again. The study does an excellent job of explaining what is meant by critical thinking. It is important to have a clear definition of what you are testing before attempting an assessment. They also had a very large population sample that came from a variety of institutions. Further research should be done using the HEIghten method. Since lack of critical thinking skills is seen at the high school level, it would be beneficial to use it as an assessment prior to applying to colleges, perhaps in freshman and sophomore years. Another area of research proposed by the authors is the idea of using motivation prior to giving students the assessment exam. Evidence points to increasing student motivation leads to higher assessment scores.
Bashith, A., and Amin, S. (2017). The effect of problem based learning on EFL students’ critical thinking and learning outcome. Al-Ta’Lim Journal, 24(2), 93-102. ISSN

They don’t do not explain how the PBL model is implemented but describe how the experimental group and control group test scores are compared. It makes it difficult for the reader to recreate the study. They discuss some of the weaknesses of the study, such as how much time students are given during the stages of PBS. Many of the students were not advanced enough to mange their time successfully. Other students are just not interested and don’t want to participate and let the stronger students do all the work. This needs to be addressed in future studies, perhaps by having the groups assign tasks to each