Masters Thesis

Critical thinking development in education

Because the construct of critical thinking in education is so highly valued, substantial resources are invested into critical thinking development, yet no agreed upon general theory or pedagogical approach currently exists. Because critical thinking keywords carry large amounts of confusing ambiguity, operational definitions of critical thinking are vague. Critical thinking debates center on the fine points of skill differentiation, dispositions, and transferability of critical thinking. Because critical thinking can be about negative critique, a culture of individualistic phenomenological positivism runs counter to shared methodology and development. Cognitive psychology's framework of working memory, namely the Baddeley (2000) system, consisting of the phenomenological loop, visuospatial sketchpad, and episodic buffer, supports an argument mapping approach to critical thinking. Critical thinking keywords such as logic, inference, rationality, reason, metacognition, practice, and problem solving also support an argument mapping pedagogy. This work develops and employs a survey to describe how current university level teaching faculty feel about the construct of critical thinking in education. Major results show that 1) faculty generally feel unequipped to teach critical thinking, 2) faculty are unfamiliar with argument mapping methodology, and 3) that logical problem solving makes up the bulk of the critical thinking construct. This work develops and concludes with a general principle of constructing operationally transferable definitions of constructs in education.

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