Critical thinking and disciplinary thinking: a continuing debate
Abstract
I report a study that investigated ideas about critical thinking across three disciplines: Philosophy, History and Literary Studies. The findings point to a diversity of understandings and practices, ones that suggest the limitations of a more generic approach. I argue that a more useful conception of critical thinking is as a form of ‘metacritique’ – where the essential quality to be encouraged in students is a flexibility of thought and the ability to negotiate a range of different critical modes.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Critical thinking is generally agreed to be an intrinsic part of higher education.
“Critical thinking is a difficult concept to define, but is nevertheless generally agreed to be an intrinsic part of higher education (Davies and Barnett, 2015; Moore, 2011).”
From ‘Why is this hard, to have critical thinking?’ Exploring the factors affecting critical thinking with international higher education students (2024) · cites this paper as Moore, 2011
Cited by
Sorted by citations
El Soufi, N., & See, B. H. (2019) · Studies in Educational Evaluation · doi:10.1016/j.stueduc.2018.12.006 · Cited by 183 · see citing works
Altun, E., & Yildirim, N. (2023) · Thinking Skills and Creativity · doi:10.1016/j.tsc.2023.101367 · Cited by 59 · see citing works
Aston, K. J. (2024) · Active Learning in Higher Education · doi:10.1177/14697874231168341 · Cited by 58 · see citing works
Debatable Truths: What Buddhist Argumentation Reveals about Critical Thinking
Lugli, L. (2015) · Contemporary Buddhism · doi:10.1080/14639947.2015.1026150 · Cited by 6 · see citing works
- Authors
- Moore, T. J.
- Affiliations
- Monash University (AU)
- Corresponding author
- Moore, Tim John
- Venue
- Higher Education Research & Development
- Publisher
- Informa UK Limited
- Published
- 2011-05-03
- Volume
- 30
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 261-274
- ISSN
- 0729-4360 (ISSN-L)
- 1469-8366
- OpenAlex
- W2021216233
- Cited by
- 171
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 14 · 2025: 12 · 2024: 17 · 2023: 10 · 2022: 10 · 2021: 15 · 2020: 17 · 2019: 10 · 2018: 14 · 2017: 9 · 2016: 9 · 2015: 13 · 2014: 10 · 2013: 5 · 2012: 4
- FWCI
- 30.64
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Higher Education Research & Development (publishedVersion)
- Swinburne figshare (Swinburne University of Technology) (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Education › Education and Critical Thinking Development
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Educational Strategies and Epistemologies
- Social Sciences › Education › Evaluation of Teaching Practices
- Keywords
- critical thinking, disciplinary thinking, metacriticism, philosophy education, history education, literary studies education, critical modes
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
