Instructional Interventions Affecting Critical Thinking Skills and Dispositions: A Stage 1 Meta-Analysis

TLDR

Critical thinking is widely recognized as an essential skill for purposeful, self‑regulatory judgment. The study aims to meta‑analyze the effect of instructional interventions on critical thinking skills and dispositions. The authors conduct a meta‑analysis of 117 studies involving 20,698 participants to assess instructional impacts on critical thinking. The analysis found a modest average effect size of 0.34, high heterogeneity, and that intervention type and pedagogical grounding explained 32 % of variance, underscoring the need for explicit critical‑thinking objectives.

Abstract

Critical thinking (CT), or the ability to engage in purposeful, self-regulatory judgment, is widely recognized as an important, even essential, skill. This article describes an ongoing meta-analysis that summarizes the available empirical evidence on the impact of instruction on the development and enhancement of critical thinking skills and dispositions. We found 117 studies based on 20,698 participants, which yielded 161 effects with an average effect size ( g+) of 0.341 and a standard deviation of 0.610. The distribution was highly heterogeneous ( Q T = 1,767.86, p < .001). There was, however, little variation due to research design, so we neither separated studies according to their methodological quality nor used any statistical adjustment for the corresponding effect sizes. Type of CT intervention and pedagogical grounding were substantially related to fluctuations in CT effects sizes, together accounting for 32% of the variance. These findings make it clear that improvement in students’ CT skills and dispositions cannot be a matter of implicit expectation. As important as the development of CT skills is considered to be, educators must take steps to make CT objectives explicit in courses and also to include them in both preservice and in-service training and faculty development.