The impact of attitudes beliefs and cognitive reflection on the development of critical thinking skills in online students
Learning and development of critical thinking skills in higher education is essential for academic achievement. The following experiment is first to examine the effect of online student perceptions and attitudes towards critical thinking across dimensions of confidence, valuing, misconceptions cognitive reflection and authors writing. Furthermore, we developed and examined the effect of four critical thinking workshops with an aim to help students improve their grade point average. Our analyses demonstrated that student’s confidence and cognitive reflection predict academic achievement. Moreover, the online CT intervention improved students’ CT attitudes, skills, and academic performance. Significant interactions were observed between time (pre and post-intervention) and intervention in cognitive reflection (as measured by the extend version of the cognitive reflection test; CRT) confidence beliefs and attitudes related to critical thinking (as measured by the critical thinking toolkit CriTT), and student grade point average (GPA; as measured by students performance on online modules). It was concluded that the critical thinking can be thought and that an intervention based ‘how to think’ rather than ‘what to think’ mixed approach can help students develop critical thinking, strengthen their confidence in critical thinking and help students improve their academic performance in an online setting.