Lifelong Learning and the Development of a Critical Technology in Higher Education

"An important passage in the 2010 OECD report (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) underlines the need for formal education to enter the workplace: “in the nations where work is organized to support high levels of employee discretion in solving complex problems, the evidence shows that firms tend to be more active in terms of innovations developed through their own in house creative efforts” (OECD, 2010, theme 1, p. 10). . The key point is in fact that new skills are needed, because traditional skills learnt at school or at university are disappearing and are not deemed useful in facing the needs for innovation and growth that society today demands. The concept behind our project is therefore that of verifying the effectiveness of a model constructed to increase critical thinking skills, which is essential in environments such as those described by the OECD in the above-mentioned document, in order to apply this to settings where employed people are involved in training.. The present contribution aims to describe the results of a study carried out at DIPED - Dipartimento di Progettazione Educativa e Didattica (Department for Educational Design) at Roma Tre University, where the levels of critical thinking skills of students were assessed through an ad hoc content analysis protocol..