Critical Thinking Among College and Graduate Students

Abstract

Critical thinking is a major goal of post-secondary instruction, but empirical evidence that undergraduates have developed this skill is minimal and is virtually nonexistent for graduate students. Further, various critical thinking measures focus on different types of problems that require different cognitive strategies, yielding mixed results. This study investigated differences in critical thinking between undergraduate and graduate students in the social and mathematical sciences, using multiple measures of critical thinking that reflect different types of problem structure. The authors found educational level and academic area differences across measures, which they explain by the type of problem structures that the disciplines emphasize and by the measure of critical thinking.