Improving critical thinking: Effects of dispositions and instructions oneconomics students' reasoning skills
RIS ID
82040
Abstract
This experiment investigated the impact of critical thinking dispositions and instructions on economics students' performance on reasoning skills. Participants (. N=. 183) were exposed to one of four conditions: critical thinking instruction, critical thinking instruction with self-explanation prompts during subsequent practice, critical thinking instruction with activation prompts during subsequent practice, or no critical thinking instruction or prompts (control). In all conditions, practice was a within-subjects factor, some task categories present in the test were practiced on a business case, others were not. Participants in the instruction conditions significantly outperformed participants in the control condition on the immediate and delayed post-test, but only on the practiced task categories - with the exception of the self-explanations condition, which also showed a better performance than the control condition on not-practiced categories, though only on the immediate post-test. Dispositions (i.e., Actively Open-minded Thinking and Need for Cognition) predicted reasoning skills at pre-test but did not interact with instructions on post-tests performances.
Publication Details
Heijltjes, A., Van Gog, T., Leppink, J. & Paas, F. (2014). Improving critical thinking: Effects of dispositions and instructions oneconomics students' reasoning skills. Learning and Instruction, 29 (2014), 31-42.