Led by our partners from Modern Didactics Center (Lithuania), our first intellectual output – “A European collection of the Critical Thinking skills and dispositions needed in different professional fields for the 21st century” – is now available at http://bit.ly/2sEffTH.
This report provides an overall analysis of the understanding of Critical Thinking (CT) by employers and establishes similarities and differences in its expression, need and practical application at the workplace. Adopting a qualitative research methodology, 32 focus groups were conducted enrolling 189 professionals from 9 European countries. The focus groups comprised graduates from 4 different professional fields, namely Biomedical Sciences, STEM (Sciences, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics), Social Sciences and the Humanities. resulting in the main outcome and novelty of the current report, we present a proposal for a “European Inventory of Critical Thinking skills and dispositions for the 21st century“. This inventory is constituted not only by a list of different CT skills and dispositions categorized upon the applied framework according to its overall interpretation by professionals, but also attending to their specific understanding in the different professional fields, linking them to the tendencies, differences and context-based scenarios which better illustrate their practical application and needs within the fields.
We want to thank all the cooperation and effort of the different researchers, organizations, companies, employers and employees of the 9 European countries involved in the study. We also thank the Steering Committee members of the CRITHINKEDU project, Diane F. Halpern (Claremont McKenna College, USA), Harvey Siegel (University of Miami, USA) and Ronald Barnett (University College London, UK) for their wise and helpful reflections.
The CRITHINKEDU Team