Abstract
Our November issue this year is loosely themed around supporting students’ critical thinking and problem solving through active learning approaches. I say ‘loosely’ because we are privileged at Active Learning in Higher Education to receive articles on a very wide range of active learning approaches to support students as engaged learners. In this issue however, I have selected articles which place a special emphasis on how instructors in higher education can support and develop students’ critical thinking and problem solving.
In the first article of this issue, Robinson and Held (p. 445) advance our understanding of how to create psychological safety in online teaching for interdisciplinary student teams. Drawing on both survey and student interview data, the authors propose that lecturers provide extra timetabled group work, model openness and curiosity, design assessment tasks that necessitate diverse contributions and normalise constructive failure through iterative feedback. Crucially, the authors draw out the importance of creating psychologically safe online environments to develop students’ problem-solving skills and innovation.
Also focussing on the online teaching environment, Chao and Wright (p. 463) report on active learning approaches in a Massive Online Open Course (MOOC) designed to develop students’ critical thinking capabilities. In their article, the authors explore the interdependence between students’ confidence and curiosity when developing critical thinking skills, and propose a Curiosity-Confidence Crank framework for educators to help foster the awareness and development of critical thinking.
Holford and colleagues’ article (p. 483) is an investigation of using preprint review as an authentic assessment to allow students to demonstrate knowledge and critical thinking skills in real-world tasks. Their results suggest that peer review has significant potential as an active learning approach for supporting students’ learning about the scientific process and to think critically about scientific studies. As a research methods lecturer, I was struck by the potential applications of preprint review as an authentic assessment for supporting students’ knowledge about the research cycle and critical thinking skills more widely. Moxie and colleagues’ article (p. 501) on a team science model may also be of interest to those who teach, and support the teaching of, undergraduate research. The Paper Chase model was designed to support active learning through structured collaborative writing around research, and the authors found that students identified many positives of the approach including demystifying research among undergraduate students.
Students’ perspectives are prioritised in several papers in this issue, including Theelen and colleagues’ article (p. 521) on instructional strategies to support cognitive activation (e.g. strategies such as using worked examples or using multiple sensory modalities to enhance learning). The authors found that although many strategies were observed in practice, their frequency varied significantly, with effective strategies often reported as being the least frequently used. They discuss the need for targeted professional development and ongoing evaluation to align instructional practices with students’ engagement.
Darcie and colleagues (p. 543) take a student-centred approach in their empirical study of how classroom learning cultures shape student thinking dispositions and practices. They describe how students fell back to familiar routines when faced with uncertainty, highlighting the importance of developing thinking dispositions, not only skills, when fostering critical thinking that can be applied to diverse situations. This study also emphasises the importance of developing cultures of thinking, where the use of critical thinking is expected.
In their article in this issue, Brady and colleagues (p. 557) sought to better understand college students’ learning experiences by identifying and describing the self-regulatory processes students implement before initiating academic tasks. They found that students engaged in a range of forethought processes, and propose that forethought should be investigated as a key aspect of students’ active engagement in self-regulated learning.
Also taking a student-centred approach to student learning, and bringing this themed issue to a close, Ilie and colleagues (p. 575) investigated students’ perspectives on learning and learning gains in university settings across several academic disciplines. The authors found three distinct categories of student understanding of learning gain (i.e. the development of subject-adjacent skills, abilities, and competencies, including the development of critical thinking and problem solving skills). A more comprehensive understanding of learning gain was distinguished by students’ intentionality, self-reflection, and prioritisation of deep approaches to learning. The authors suggest that enabling students to engage with their own learning more deeply is likely to support improvements in learning gains.
I hope this short introduction to our themed November issue has piqued your interest in some or all of the articles selected, and inspires further reading on active learning approaches to developing students’ critical thinking and wider learning, and I wish you happy reading.
