Browsing by Subject "harkittu ajattelu"

Aims. From an individual student’s perspective, the changing work and working environments demand academic expertise based on a comprehensive knowledge base and flexibility. Generic skills learned during university studies are thus essential in this process. Previous research has shown that critical thinking, as one of the generic skills, is in itself a prerequisite for the development of other areas in academic expertise. Recent studies have reported extensive variation in university students’ critical thinking skills since the beginning of university studies. These studies have highlighted the area as central for developing academic expertise. Deliberate thinking, often described as conscious and controlled, has close connections to critical thinking. Although this conceptual link has been noted in recent literature, only few studies have combined the areas and examined them from the viewpoint of developing academic expertise. To address this issue, this thesis explores the relationship between critical and deliberate thinking and clarifies how they could be accounted for while developing academic expertise. Methods. The study was conducted by analyzing written CLA performance task responses by 18 first-year teacher students. CLA tasks are designed to measure critical thinking by presenting open-ended questions about a real-world situation together with selected documents. Three core skills of the student’s critical thinking, namely analytic reasoning, problem solving and argumentation, were assessed using a theory-based scoring matrix. The deliberate thinking embodied by the responses was identified and categorized by the use of deductive content analysis. Finally, the results of the two analysis methods were combined in order to depict the connection between critical and deliberate thinking. Results and conclusions. In line with previous studies, remarkable variation in the students’ critical thinking skills was found in the study. Regarding deliberate thinking, it was possible to point out the strengths, weaknesses and distinctive characteristics from each student’s response. The comparison of critical and deliberate thinking clarified the relationship between the concepts. It also indicated that it is possible to combine these areas both on a theoretical and empirical level, it provides meaningful results and it builds a more detailed picture of the students’ problem-solving processes.