Unpacking the nature of critical thinking for educational purposes

ABSTRACT

Although critical thinking has been widely accepted as an educational goal for decades, clear evidence for the development of students’ critical thinking is sparse. Critical thinking has been conceptualised as skill, knowledge, and disposition respectively in psychology, philosophy and critical theory, but which applies to education is unclear. In this paper, we argue that treating critical thinking as skill is most appropriate in education. However, there are still three competing theories of critical thinking as skill: as a single unitary skill, as a set of disparate sub-skills, and as a composite skill with several sub-skills. We evaluated the validity of these theories through conducting Rasch and correlation analyses on the results of 385 undergraduate students in Thailand on the Multi-Purpose Assessment of Critical Thinking (MPACT) test. The findings suggest that critical thinking is a composite skill with several sub-skills with implications for the teaching and testing of critical thinking.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical thinking
• theories
• test
• Rasch analysis
• education

Acknowledgments

We would like to express our heartfelt gratitude to the undergraduate students from over ten universities in Thailand for participating in the MPACT Test. We appreciate the insights from university educators in Thailand, who provided invaluable feedback concerning the usability of the various segments of the MPACT test. We would also like to thank Duangjaichanok Pansa for help with the analyses.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Khagendra Raj Dhakal

Khagendra Raj Dhakal is a Ph.D. candidate in applied linguistics at King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi. He has been teaching applied linguistics and general education courses at King Mongkut's University of Technology North Bangkok for more than a decade as a lecturer. His interest areas include education policy, testing, critical thinking, and global competencies. Dhakal is also a member of National Council on Measurement in Education.

Richard Watson Todd

Richard Watson Todd is Associate Professor at King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi. He has a Ph.D. from the University of Liverpool. He is the author of numerous articles and several books, including Discourse Topics (John Benjamins, 2016). His research interests include text linguistics, corpus linguistics, and educational innovations.

Natjiree Jaturapitakkul

Natjiree Jaturapitakkul, Ph.D. is an assistant professor at School of Liberal Arts, King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi in Bangkok where she teaches English for undergraduates and graduates in the ELT program. She has published and presented papers on English language teaching and learning, language assessment, test development, and ESP testing.