THINK4JOBS Guidelines: A protocol for Critical Thinking transfer from curricula to labour market

Abstract

The Intellectual Output 4 (IO4) reports the results from the implementation of the Critical Thinking (CT) Blended Apprenticeships Curricula (CTBAC) described in the third Intellectual Output IO3 [1], and it discusses the recorded gains in CT skills and dispositions in students enrolled in the piloting activities. A cross- and intra-disciplinary analysis, resulting from the comparison between the scores obtained before and at the end of the piloting CTBACs courses, provides support to the recommendations proposed by the partnership for the Critical Thinking Blended Apprenticeships Curricula implementation, which are gathered under the part III of this report: “THINK4JOBS guidelines for CT transfer from curricula to apprenticeships”.

University of Évora (UÉvora), Portugal was the partner who led the delivery of the IO4. The objectives of IO4 were defined as follows: 1. Assess the changes in CT skills and dispositions associated with the implementation of 12 CT blended apprenticeship curricula as developed by the University-Business partnership for the disciplines Business Informatics, Teacher Education, Veterinary Medicine, and Business and Economics and the course English as a Foreign Language; 2. Use this data for a cross-disciplinary analysis; 3. Present the “THINK4JOBS guidelines for CT transfer from curricula to apprenticeships”.

The CTBACs implementation was at the inception of these objectives. The implementation of these curricula was facilitated by the close collaboration between Higher Education (HE) instructors and Labour Market Organisation (LMO) tutors in creating the scenarios. The Moodle platform was used as a learning interface for CTBACs. The implementation of the new curricula occurred at the fall and spring terms of the 2021/2022 academic year. Albeit CTABCs will be repeated in the 2022/23 academic year, the analysis presented in here does not consider this.

In total, 609 students were enrolled in the piloting activities, a larger number than the initially envisaged in the project submission (150 students). Still, not all the participating students responded to the questionnaires. Respondents that filled the pre- and the last posttest questionnaires represented 54% of the students engaging in the activities. A difficulty arose to reach the initially proposed numbers of control students (non-engaged in the pilot courses) since most courses were not offered in two different semesters and students did not accept to be left out of activities that they perceive of bringing some benefits for their success. Only the Greece and Portuguese partners succeeded in organizing a control group, even though the one for Portugal was of a small size.

The gains in students’ CT skills and dispositions following the CTBACs implementation were assessed using a new instrument that merged two questionnaires [a short-form of the Nair’s Critical Thinking Self-assessment Scale (CTSAS) [2] developed for this specific purpose, and the Student-Educator Negotiated Critical Thinking Dispositions Scale (SENCTDS) [3], which was applied to the students before, during and after the interventions. The version of the instrument in the original language (English) was translated into German, Greek, Romanian 9 and Portuguese, to be implemented by the partners. The two questionnaires were merged into one google form document, for commodity of the respondents and to ensure that both were filled at the same time.

The validation of the instruments was performed using the answers gathered from all the linguistic versions of the questionnaires. The preliminary independent validation of both questionnaires showed that they represent a strong tool, with a good goodness-of-fit indices and a strong internal consistency. The invariance analysis confirmed that both the part of the instrument that assessed CT skills and the CT dispositions remained stable between countries, therefore supporting the quality of the instrument and of the translated versions used (German, Greek, Romanian and Portuguese vs. English). These versions represent additional added-value productions from the project.

The cross-disciplinary analysis evidences the existing gains associated with the implementation of the blended curricula. Some baseline differences were found by countries, age and sex in the overall population for specific CT skills and dispositions. These changes may reflect the background cultural or experiential differences in students from the various disciplines/courses involved in the project [Germany (Business Informatics), Greece [Teacher Education], Lithuania (course of English as a Foreign Language), Romania (Business and Economics), and Portugal (Veterinary Medicine)].

CTBACs-related gains were more evident in skills than dispositions (ca. ten points vs. one point in the respective integrated scores), which may derive from the fact that it is more difficult to change attitudes (dispositions) in short-timed interventions than procedures. Moreover, even though the control groups were not possible for all the countries, when they existed results show higher gains in the integrated scores of CT skills and dispositions for students enrolled in CTBACs than in students engaged in the control group, particularly in the Evaluation, Inference and Explanation skills, and in the disposition Attentiveness.

From the interpretation of the results gathered in the implementation of the blended apprenticeship curricula, the guidelines for implementation of CTBACs were prepared around the following steps: 1. Explain what you are doing – Explain to the students why critical thinking is a crucial competency in today workforce, and how it is understood and praised in a particular profession. Explicitly include the development of CT within the outcomes of your course. 2. CT training must be a continuous and pervasive process. – To succeed, an effort is needed across the discipline curricula to endorse students’ CT skills and dispositions; skills need training and dispositions require internalization of the desirable attitudes, so time and a combined effort at the disciplinary level are necessary to obtain more and consistent gains or positive changes. 3. Get time to do it – supporting the previous item, time is needed also at the course level to work on the proposed goals. Both students and Educators need to schedule the activities, so they have time to prepare, develop, and provide or receive feedback regarding the students´ performance, so the intervention leads to meaningful learning. 4. Get connected to reality – by presenting students with cases issued from situations professionals face daily, students’ motivation increases, and they perceive more positively the learning experiences. 5. Accept reasonable risk – development of critical thinking may benefit from presenting students with complex problems with uncertain solutions, where students are allowed to stumble, since failure (an incorrect decision-making) under a safe environment, allows students to think on the premises that drove to the error and corrective feedback from the educator plays a crucial role as a learning tool. 6. Reflect on CT skills and dispositions development – offer the students the opportunity to reflect on the changes on the way they reasoned through the situations or the attitudes they developed in order to increase the effect of the learning interventions and better cultivate reflective thinking about one’ experiences.