Investigating the impact of critical thinking instruction on writing performance: A multilevel modelling analysis of relative gain data in the Australian national assessment program

Abstract

Critical thinking is an international educational and economic priority, as are writing and effective communication skills. Little is known, however, about how these skills interact or whether instruction in one skillset has transferable benefits to the other. Given declining performance in writing skills in the Australian context, evidence that critical thinking instruction improves students’ writing performance should be of interest to policy makers and school leaders. In this quasi-experimental retrospective cohort study, we utilised multilevel modelling to examine the effects of direct online critical thinking instruction on writing performance by Queensland state school students as measured by results from the Australian standardised testing scheme (NAPLAN) assessing writing structure, grammar, and spelling. Receiving critical thinking instruction correlated with significantly higher relative gains in academic performance across literacy domains and year levels compared to a comparable numeracy instruction control. We argue that these findings indicate a transfer of cognitive skills developed through critical thinking instruction to literacy domains and discuss the potential mechanisms underlying these effects. We summarily hypothesise that improving students’ ability to identify, analyse, construct, and evaluate arguments empowers them to navigate the cognitive and metacognitive demands of academic writing with greater ease, leading to improved outcomes in standardised test settings and on writing tasks more generally.