Led by our partners from the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain), our second intellectual output – “A European review on Critical Thinking educational practices in Higher Education Institutions” – is now available at http://bit.ly/2Pwtic0.
This report is directed to university teachers, pedagogical support teams and institutional leaders, providing an overall understanding on how European Higher Education Institutions (EHEI) foster Critical Thinking (CT), taking into account both the current educational intervention studies reported in the literature and teachers’ educational practices. Adopting a mixed method research design, 46 papers from the literature were reviewed and 53 interviews with university teachers from 9 European countries were carried out. The analysis comprised both studies and teachers’ interviews 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, from the comparison and identification of the gaps between the first CRITHINKEDU’ intellectual output – “A European collection of the Critical Thinking skills and dispositions needed in different professional fields for the 21st century” – and this review, a preliminary proposal of guidelines for quality in CT education in the European Higher Education Institutions is presented.
We want to thank all the cooperation and effort of the different researchers, organizations and Higher Education Institutions 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