Teaching Critical Thinking in Higher Education: Avoiding, Detecting, and Explaining Bias in Reasoning

Abstract

Fostering students’ critical thinking is a major objective of higher education, and teachers play a crucial role in this. Yet, little is known about how to support teachers in fulfilling this role successfully. Therefore, the main aim of this dissertation research was to start investigating how to equip higher education teachers with the knowledge and skills necessary for teaching one essential critical thinking skill: The ability to avoid bias in reasoning and decision-making. The studies in this dissertation provided first evidence for the trainability of teachers’ ability to avoid bias in their own reasoning, their ability to detect bias in students’ reasoning, and their ability to clearly explain to students why their reasoning is biased. These abilities are pivotal for teaching critical thinking, and especially, for providing students with feedback on their reasoning. Importantly, the findings showed that these skills not only can be trained, but need to be trained. However, the findings also indicate that improving their critical thinking (teaching) skills is by no means a guarantee that teachers’ positive attitudes, necessary for bringing these skills into their teaching practice, will increase along with this. Moreover, trained skills did not necessarily transfer: teachers did not always become better at avoiding, detecting, and explaining related but untrained biases. Thus, professional development training on teaching critical thinking, and future research into the effectiveness of such training, should focus on improving relevant critical thinking (teaching) skills, as well as on factors that foster transfer and positive attitudes towards teaching these thinking skills.