An assessment of critical thinking in the Middle East: Evaluating the effectiveness of special courses interventions

Abstract

Critical thinking is a requisite skill for college success, employability, and conducive active civic participation. Empirical studies have noted to the low achievement of Arab students on critical thinking assessments. Insufficient endeavors have attempted to propose effective interventions enhancing critical thinking abilities among Arab students. The current analysis provides a preliminary overview of a special course designed to improve critical thinking skills among Arab college students. Results indicated a great improvement in all areas of critical thinking including explanation of information, identification of strategies, implementing solutions, and formulating logical inferences. Students’ scores on a critical thinking assessment increased from sufficient to good as a result of participating in the program. The gains are consistent after controlling for gender, major, class seniority, and nationality. Notwithstanding these promising results, this paper is limited in several respects including the choice of critical thinking assessments represented by two questions, the highly contextualized setting making it difficult to be replicated, and the convenient sampling strategy used to recruit participants. This set of limitations, however, does not discourage proactive attempts like designing special courses to enhance students’ critical thinking acquisition in the Middle East.