Do Universities Teach Critical Thinking?

 This recent report from the OECD makes some important points especially on learning outcomes. Timely given the headlines in this week’s THES. A few paragraphs from the OECD report -Do Universities Teach Critical Thinking?: https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/cc9fa6aa-en/index.html?itemId=/content/publication/cc9fa6aa-en

“Higher education contributes immensely to economic growth, social progress, and overall quality of life through the skills students and graduates acquire. Qualifications awarded by higher education institutions are valued because they are perceived to signal the skills required by labour markets and broader society. Employers use these qualifications as ways to identify and select job candidates who master essential and requisite skills. Higher education is trusted by employers and society to the extent that there is an equilibrium between skills supply and demand.

However, there are signs that the skills supply of graduates no longer matches skills demand in the labour market. Quantitative qualifications mismatch is turning into a severe issue in many countries, compromising productivity, growth, and the continued increase in prosperity. Even more significant is the qualitative mismatch between the skills demand generated by the economic and social reality in labour markets and societies, and the supply of skills by higher education institutions. Employers and economic organisations express with increasingly louder voices that they are no longer confident that graduates have acquired the skills needed for the 21st-century workplace generic skills such as problem solving, communication, creativity, and critical thinking.

Whether perceived or real, skills mismatch poses a serious risk to the trustworthiness of higher education. What is needed is more transparency about the skills students acquire. Unfortunately, this has not been a strength of most higher education systems. Transparency tools such as international rankings are quite good at capturing research-related measures or input measures in education quality but do not provide any insights into students’ actual learning outcomes. The few available measures, for example, provided by the OECD Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC), are far from sufficient and invigorate the demand for more and better metrics.”

“There’s no way that any one specific assessment can measure all of critical thinking,” acknowledged Doris Zahner, CAE’s chief academic officer and the co-editor of the new report.

“What we do really well is measure a specific, well-defined component of critical thinking: namely, analytical reasoning and evaluation and problem-solving,” she said.

“That includes data literacy, understanding quantitative information, being able to gather information from various sources and then making a decision based on this and crafting an answer that supports your argument and refutes the opposite – that’s what the assessment does.”

The results of the tests, published by the OECD on 30 August in the book Does Higher Education Teach Students to Think Critically? are stark: on average, only 45 per cent of tested university students were proficient in critical thinking, while one in five demonstrated only “emerging” talent in this area.

What’s more, the “learning gain” of students between the start and the end of their courses was found to be small on average, while there were big discrepancies between courses, with those studying fields closely aligned to real-world occupations – such as business, agriculture, and health – scoring the worst.