Higher education and critical thinking: the nexus. Keynote lecture

Critical thinking is one of the major ambitions of higher education. An increasingly complex society requires members who are not only willing but are also disposed to critically analyze all kinds of input and make adequate decisions. A highly complex society cannot afford its strategic decision makers to take information for granted. Hence, higher education has to make sure its graduates are disposed towards critical thinking. This is far from easy as the notion of critical thinking itself is disputed (although various gurus ascertain the importance of critical thinking and pretend to know how it can be induced) and far more research is needed to outline the conditions of effective critical thinking education. In this contribution an attempt is made to provide a state of the art on critical thinking in higher education. An overview is provided of the relevance of critical thinking for higher education and the research on the meaning, the assessment and the development of critical thinking in higher education is reviewed. It will be shown that as an ambition critical thinking is highly regarded but poorly assessed. Furthermore we will argue that the notion of critical thinking in higher education is intrinsically related to research-integration in higher education. The relevance of methodological rigor will be revealed. Finally, it will be argued that inducing the development of critical thinking is not self-evident or intrinsically related to higher education, it rather requires goal-oriented efforts to design learning environments for the systemic and systematic development of critical thinking. In line with recent empirical findings, it will be argued that infusion approaches might be more effective than immersion approaches provided they are well-designed. Keynote sponsored by the Netherlands Educational Research Association, SIG Higher Education (VOR)status: publishe