Developing Critical Thinking Skills Through Work-Based, Blended Apprenticeship Curriculum for Business Communication

Abstract

The development of students’ critical thinking skills through the teaching process is a key factor that reveals the performance and effectiveness of the educational act. Moreover, the demand in the labor market for graduates who have good communication skills and who can logically analyze certain situations and make relevant arguments has increased. Thus, this paper describes the curriculum for the Business Communication course carried out within the project “Critical thinking for successful Jobs (Think4Jobs)”, which was designed in such a way as to develop students’ ability to think critically. During the course, students will analyze different case studies in which they will have to logically research and organize certain information, data, notions according to their relevance and significance in order to be able to propose appropriate conclusions. Therefore, this paper suggests that critical thinking can be integrated as a component part of any discipline, given the increased interest in this area. As a sequel to this paper, is proposed a statistical analysis of the impact of critical thinking on students following the implementation of the Business Communication course.