Improving critical thinking: Effects of dispositions and instructions on economics students' reasoning skills

TY - JOUR

T1 - Improving critical thinking

T2 - Effects of dispositions and instructions on economics students' reasoning skills

AU - Heijltjes, Anita

AU - van Gog, Tamara

AU - Leppink, Jimmie

AU - Paas, Fred

PY - 2014/2

Y1 - 2014/2

N2 - 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.

AB - 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.

KW - Biased reasoning

KW - Critical thinking instructions

KW - Dispositions

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84883015749&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1016/j.learninstruc.2013.07.003

DO - 10.1016/j.learninstruc.2013.07.003

M3 - Article

AN - SCOPUS:84883015749

SN - 0959-4752

VL - 29

SP - 31

EP - 42

JO - Learning and Instruction

JF - Learning and Instruction

ER -