An assessment of critical thinking in the Middle East: Evaluating the effectiveness of special courses interventions.

Manuel Santos-Trigo,Wael Yousef

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0262088

Abstract

Critical thinking is a requisite skill for college success, employability, and conducive active civic participation. Empirical studies have noted to the low achievement of Arab students on critical thinking assessments. Insufficient endeavors have attempted to propose effective interventions enhancing critical thinking abilities among Arab students. The current analysis provides a preliminary overview of a special course designed to improve critical thinking skills among Arab college students. Results indicated a great improvement in all areas of critical thinking including explanation of information, identification of strategies, implementing solutions, and formulating logical inferences. Students' scores on a critical thinking assessment increased from sufficient to good as a result of participating in the program. The gains are consistent after controlling for gender, major, class seniority, and nationality. Notwithstanding these promising results, this paper is limited in several respects including the choice of critical thinking assessments represented by two questions, the highly contextualized setting making it difficult to be replicated, and the convenient sampling strategy used to recruit participants. This set of limitations, however, does not discourage proactive attempts like designing special courses to enhance students' critical thinking acquisition in the Middle East.

Highlights

Critical thinking is reflective judgment involving the explanation, evaluation, analysis, and interpretation of information to generate logical inferences [1]
Lee, Gong, Bae, and Choi [28] reported standardized mean differences of 0.42 and 0.29 in favor of non-lecturing methods compared to lecturing techniques on the California Critical Thinking Dispositions Inventory (CCTDI) and the California Critical Thinking Skills Test (CCTST) in their meta-analysis [28]
The findings indicate that a sizable improvement in critical thinking ability is observed once an intervention is administered

Summary

Introduction

Critical thinking is reflective judgment involving the explanation, evaluation, analysis, and interpretation of information to generate logical inferences [1]. Critical thinking improves students’ academic achievement, career outcomes, and civic engagement [2, 3]. The study of critical thinking in Arab countries suffers from several conceptual and methodological problems warranting systematic investigation [4, 5]. Researchers have utilized translated American and European assessments without proper modifications [6]. Studies focused on a single course, college, or program [7]. Proposed interventions for enhancing critical thinking skills were designed for small homogenous populations [8]. Fourth, published critical thinking skills interventions lacked details on the treatment, instructional strategies, assessment tools, or teaching styles [9].

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion