Literature Review #1: Fostering critical thinking skills in secondary education to prepare students for university

Article taken from Volume 25 of Research in Post-Compulsory Education

Citation:

van der Zanden, Petrie J. A. C., et al. “Fostering Critical Thinking Skills in Secondary Education to  Prepare Students for University: Teacher Perceptions and Practices.” Research in Post-Compulsory Education, vol. 25, no. 4, Routledge, 2020, pp. 394–419, doi:10.1080/13596748.2020.1846313.

Summary:

This study consisted of a series of semi-formal interviews with nine secondary school teachers asking them to evaluate the "critical thinking" skills they saw as important to succeeding in post-secondary education. The primary contributor for this study, Petrie van der Zanden, is a postdoctoral researcher for the Teachers Academy, located in the Netherlands, with a particular interest in how teachers affect student growth in critical thinking. The other contributors are all professors involved in varying fields of study including behavioral science, developmental psychology, and teacher education. 

 

The main goal of this case study was to identify the educational "gap" some students experienced when transitioning from secondary to post-secondary schools: "Students described their learning as focused on memorising and understanding concepts, whereas they felt that university education placed greater emphasis on evaluation, argumentation, or critical thinking which they were not used to. ... As a result of feeling inadequately prepared, they experienced high levels of stress and anxiety after the transition to university" (396-397). The interviews conducted revealed four different facets of critical thinking that the teachers emphasized: analysis, evaluation, creativity, and research. Many of the teachers had different interpretations of what these terms meant, but they can be summarized thusly:

1. Analysis -- The ability to break down a problem into multiple parts, in order to better understand and solve it. As one teacher puts it "They’re really going to have to take a lot of steps to make sure they achieve a result. And the pitfall is thinking ‘I’m here and I need to be there’. The trick is to envisage that whole process. That’s something they really need to be able to do at university, to not only think ‘right, I’ve got something and I want to get somewhere’, but rather look at that whole process to get them there..." (401).
   
2. Evaluation -- The ability for students to judge the value of information, including the value of their own learning. Students are expected more than ever to self-regulate their own learning process and behaviors while they're in college.
3. Creative thinking -- The ability to formulate original ideas. Many teachers believed, perhaps erroneously, that this ability is not as important for students who do not plan to study in programs in social sciences or humanities. One teacher rationalizes this argument by saying, "I suspect that in science-related study programmes science is studied accorded to very specific rules or something like that. That much more is specified, an experiment, measurements, yes, that there is less room to think outside the box, that’s what I suspect" (404).
4.  Research -- The ability to interpret research or findings. Teachers unanimously agreed that this was a very important factor in determining student success.

 The qualitative findings in this study lead the researchers to believe that when secondary teachers attempt to foster critical thinking skills in students, their knowledge is based on their own experiences when they were in college, which could be outdated or misinformed. The researchers recommended that secondary schools and universities collaborate more in their curriculum to make sure students have a more grounded understanding of the critical thinking skills they need to develop before entering the world of post-secondary education.

Value:

This reading is closely related to another scholarly report I read about how the quality of secondary education was a strong determiner of how likely a student was to drop out of college. That article prescribed a similar course of action, which was to integrate secondary schools with colleges and workplaces in order to better inform students of the important life/career choices they need to make. Both of these articles contribute to a more general narrative of how the preparation students go through before college gives them the best possible chances of graduating, and that ties into the discussion of what constitutes a successful, meaningful gap year.