Conceptualizing Critical Thinking Skills: An Empirical Study of Malaysian Undergraduate Students and Academic Staff

Analytical and creative thinking are essential skills for employers today. Higher education should therefore be about learning how to think, not just what to think. Despite general agreement on the purpose of university, not all students master thinking skills, in part due to widespread difficulties in comprehending what critical thinking is. Two studies sought to make more widely accessible critical thinking descriptions from a common taxonomy by Facione and to explore perceptions of their relative importance. In Study 1, 19 students and educators co-produced readable descriptions of critical thinking skills that were more understandable than the original set of descriptions, as measured by the Flesch–Kincaid metric. In Study 2, 406 students rated all core skills in the taxonomy as important, with no meaningful differences in opinion across discipline or study year. Students’ insights from the interviews in Study 1 supported this finding. Additionally, students expressed lower perceived self-efficacy in self-regulation skills, which they recognized as underdeveloped within their university curriculum. These findings have broad implications for Asian higher education by breaking down barriers to understanding critical thinking concepts, so that educators can design more engaging and effective learning experiences in the classroom.