#31. My Attempts to Improve Critical Thinking in Higher Education
In Letter #30 I suggested that colleges and universities are, ideally, places for mental play. To play mentally is to play with ideas. Another term for it is critical thinking.
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College administrators often claim that the main benefit of a college education is a gain in critical thinking. But systematic studies—using tests of critical thinking skills at the beginning and end of the four-year college experience--reveal that such gains are quite small overall and nonexistent for approximately 45% of students (Arem & Ropsksa, 2011). Moreover, some studies indicate that colleges became even less effective in improving critical thinking beginning around 1990 than they had been before (Huber & Kuncel, 2016; Pascarella & Terenzini 2005). I’ve so far been unable to find any evidence that critical thinking improves over four years of college more than it would have, in the same or similar people, if they had spent those years doing something else. In a survey by PayScale Inc., published a few years ago, 50% of employers complained that the college graduates they hire aren’t ready for the workplace, and the primary reason they gave is lack of critical thinking skills (Belkin, 2017).
As I pointed out in Letter #30, our educational practices in primary and secondary school are almost perfectly designed to suppress critical thinking. Students learn that the goal is to come up with the answer the teacher wants or the test deems correct, the one that has been “taught.” Original thinking is likely to result in a lower grade than achieved by pure regurgitation. Increasingly in recent decades, these same methods have come to predominate in colleges as well as in primary and secondary schools.
