چکیده (انگلیسی):

Unlike most previous studies that have only assessed critical thinking skills, our study tooka comprehensive approach to critical thinking assessment. We examined the impact ofexplicit critical thinking instruction on skill acquisition as well as changes in critical think-ing dispositions and metacognition. Students receiving explicit critical thinking instructionshowed significantly greater gains on an argument analysis skills test than students in acontrol class. In addition, only the skills test scores of the critical thinking group were sig-nificantly correlated with metacognitive measures after instruction. However, the criticalthinking group showed no greater gains on measures of critical thinking dispositions. Toexamine another neglected aspect of critical thinking research, we manipulated students’test-taking motivation before assessment, but our manipulation produced no significantgains in test-taking motivation or critical thinking skills. Nevertheless, test-taking motiva-tion was significantly correlated with scores on the critical thinking skills test both beforeand after instruction and declined significantly in the control group. Our results suggestthat future studies should further examine the impact of explicit critical thinking instruc-tion on critical thinking skills, dispositions, and metacognition and identify ways to raiselow test-taking motivation.