The Effect of Teaching Metacognitive Reading Strategies on the Critical Thinking Skills of Undergraduate Students

Abstract

Metacognitive strategies have been investigated as facilitating tools for students’ reading comprehension. No studies have investigated the effect of systematic teaching of metacognitive reading strategies on students’ critical thinking skills. The present quasi-experimental study examined the effect of explicit metacognitive strategy instruction and critical thinking skills of ESL international freshman university students. Data were collected from two homogeneous 25-member groups of experimental and control learners randomly assigned to these groups. The experimental group and control group underwent 14 sessions of training. The results related to critical thinking tests revealed the mean scores of students in the metacognitive group were significantly higher than the mean score of the students in the conventional reading group (F= 1.3,82.3) = 215.973. p 0.001). Another interesting finding is that teaching metacognitive reading strategies significantly improved students’ induction (14.72) and credibility (14.30) skills. The findings provide insights for integrating metacognitive reading strategies and critical thinking skills in higher education contexts.