Promoting Critical Thinking and Life-Long Learning: An Experiment with the Theory of Planned Behavior

Abstract

Critical thinking similar to dieting, exercising or dancing is a deliberately planned behavior. It requires will, but in addition to will it requires ability and control. As such it is what psychologists refer to as a planned behavior and is influenced by all of the factors that influence planned behaviors including: behavioral intentions, attitudes, social influences, perceived control, self-efficacy and self-image. If teachers want to create students who will become life-long critical thinkers they need to enhance their students’ perceptions of these elements of the theory of planned behavior. This article reports the results of an experiment in which the critical thinking pedagogy for marketing classes (described by Celuch and Slama 1998, 2000) is used and the elements of the theory of planned behavior are measured in a pretest and a posttest. A control group is included to determine whether testing effects may have influenced the results. Testing effects proved to be negligible. The pedagogy was found to be effective in creating statistically significant increases in attitudes toward critical thinking, self-efficacy for critical thinking, and self-identity as a critical thinker. The implications of both the statistically significant and insignificant findings are discussed for research and pedagogy.