Critical thinking’s flaws: a distributed configurative review to rescue teaching and evaluating critical thinking

The expectations behind developing students’ critical thinking are high. Studying how teaching critical thinking (CT) can best be done appears primordial, as are the ways to evaluate learners’ CT. However, the unconsensual nature of CT conceptualization and the flaws in several definitions of CT create problems for teaching and evaluating it. To study how CT conceptual flaws influence its teaching and evaluation, we conducted a two stages configurative review aiming at developing a meta-theoretical framework to help researchers conceptualize CT better. Our initial review stage of 112 publications following a critical integrative synthesis process led to the creation of five synthetic constructs, each of which depicts a typical characterization of CT in the scientific literature, and analyzing its flaws. These synthetic constructs are: Teachable CT components (skills, dispositions and knowledge); CT multi- dimensional norms (epistemic, ethical and political); CT boundaries (domain-specificity and transfer); Individuals’ CT deficit view and Logico- rational view of CT. We created and improved a meta-theoretical framework to connect CT conceptualization and its associated flaws or desirable features with important considerations for teaching and evaluating CT. One novel suggestion, coined as situatedness, was to make explicit whose voices contributed to the conceptualization of CT to unravel power dynamics behind CT conceptualization. We finally suggested a new research avenue towards teaching critical approaches as an alternative to CT with the potential to avoid several flaws related to teaching and evaluating CT. We finally discuss the need for systemic and infrastructural changes to actually connect research about the conceptualization, teaching and evaluation of CT with actual practices aiming at developing students’ CT. We suggest research-practice partnerships as a possible theoretical and practical framework to drive systemic and cultural change with the potential to connect CT research and practice.