CRITICAL THINKING IN STEM LEARNING
CRITICAL THINKING IN STEM LEARNING

Summary/Abstract: The critical thinking development is a fundamental goal of the education system, at different educational levels. Critical thinking(CT) development means to support students for developing CT skills and dispositions which are required for a successful professional life, and also refers to the way of teaching at a high level of efficiency. Considered one of the most vital 21st century skills, CT is a difficult task for teachers, due to the complexity of his nature. Not only the CT concept generates debate among experts, but also whether CT is a specific domain or not. Some experts suggests "the need for explicit teaching of CT, arguing that there is little evidence suggesting that CT merely develops because of instruction in a discipline" (Halpern, 2014, apud Pnevmatikos, Christodoulou & Fachantidis, 2019). Researchers/ specialists' interests in understanding of how CT can be taught expands also on the ways of verifying the effectiveness of instructional practices in this respect. On the other hand, assessing the CT skills of students, prospective employees, is equally important for teachers and employers. Considering that critical thinking is a generic intellectual capacity that manifest itself in a broadly similar ways across disciplines, Norris & Ennis (1989) suggests to use standardised tests in order to assess students' CT (Brookfield, 2002). The article presents the importance of developing critical thinking skills among students, with an emphasis on the connection between critical thinking and the choice of a STEM career, the use of ICT for CT development, possibilities of teaching CT in STEM (HOTS objectives).

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