Sustaining critical minds: How classroom learning cultures shape student thinking dispositions and practices

Abstract

Critical thinking is routinely identified as a goal for student learning in higher education. Critical thinking, however, is difficult to define or teach, often left as an educational aspiration that is challenging to operationalize and assess. Therefore, many interventions targeting critical thinking are isolated and tend to focus on the development of cognitive skills, providing less attention to students’ dispositions toward applying these skills to different situations. In this study of a redesigned course at a research-intensive university, we query what a dispositional view of thinking can reveal about students’ understanding and experience in an active learning environment. Drawing on student reflection journals and semi-structured interviews with 13 students from two cohorts of the course, we trace how students decide when and how critical thinking is necessary and suitable, as well as when it is perceived to be too demanding or out of place in the classroom. The course included newly introduced, ill-structured problems aimed at competency development. We note that although students employed many critical thinking skills to complete these tasks, the uncertainty related to applying critical thinking to ill-structured problems often conflicted with students’ expectations of classroom instruction. When adapting to unfamiliar instructional practices, students were largely successful in using different approaches to solve problems. However, students’ sensitivity to error a…