Open Access

Juho Mäkiö, Elena Mäkiö

• While there is large body of literature devoted to teaching critical thinking (CT) in higher education, there is no consensus on what educational approaches and instructional methods are best for developing CT in students. Although many scholarly studies have explored various methods for teaching CT, there are still no conclusive findings about their impact. This study proposes a task-based educational approach that aims to teach both domain-specific skills and CT skills and dispositions. This approach integrates the teaching of CT into the subject instruction and can be applied across disciplines. To evaluate the impact of this approach on the development of CT skills in students, two educational experiments were conducted. For these experiments, two modules “Innovation management” and “Scientific seminar” were developed according to this approach and deployed at the University of Applied Sciences Emden/Leer. The Critical Thinking Assessment Tool, developed as part of the Think4Jobs project and proven in terms of validity and reliability, was used to measure students’ CT skills and dispositions. At the time of writing this paper, this tool has been used to record students‘ self-assessments at the beginning of the experiments. As this study is still in progress, further data collection, data analysis and presentation of the findings will be published later.