The development of critical thinkers : Do our efforts coincide with students’ beliefs?

Critical thinking is one of the key attributes that crops up regularly in discussions concerning the role of tertiary education. In particular, it manifests in discussions about graduate and employability attributes: along with disciplinary content and skills, stakeholders contend that graduates should emerge from their tertiary studies with enhanced abilities in critical thinking, decision making, problem solving, logical reasoning and so forth. Indeed, excellence in teaching is seen to be tied to students’ development of these skills just as much as to their building of discipline-specific knowledge. So, given that the development of these skills is thought to be an essential part of students’ university experiences, what are they, how might we go about fostering them, and how do our students perceive our efforts? What are their perceptions of not only critical thinking, its importance, development and transferability to other subjects in their education or aspects of their lives, but of our attempts to inculcate it in their education as a core value and set of skills? Hence, rather than expounding on the importance of critical thinking skills or outlining the various strategies I have developed as a philosophy lecturer to best facilitate students’ acquisition of these skills, this paper tells another story. Specifically it presents highlights from the results of a recent research project (carried out in 2008 and involving philosophy students at the University of Ballarat) that analysed students’ own beliefs regarding their development as critical thinkers