The Impact of College Students' Individual Beliefs and Preconceptions on Critical Thinking Processes: A CogLabs Study

• In Event: Moscone Center North Roundtable Session 9
  In Roundtable Session: Measuring Undergraduate Outcomes for Learning and Critical Thinking

Abstract

The critical thinking ability is a key 21st century skill and essential for information processing and decision-making processes, especially in today’s post-truth era, where a plethora of information is embedded in offline and online contexts, and individual beliefs or prejudices often become more important than factual knowledge. In this paper, we focus on the impact of college students´ individual beliefs and preconceptions on their (dis-)ability to think critically in a performance assessment using a real-life simulation (case scenario). Through qualitative analyses of the cognitive interviews (coglabs), we identified three different patterns in which students´ beliefs and preconceptions affect their critical thinking. Even though the impact of individual beliefs on students´ information processing and decision-making processes differs, it is a relevant influence.

Authors

• Jana Jurisch

• Olga Zlatkin-Troitschanskaia, Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz

• Marie-Theres Nagel, Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz

• Susanne Schmidt, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz

• Dimitri Molerov, Humboldt University of Berlin