Instructional Interventions Affecting Critical Thinking Skills and Dispositions: A Stage 1 Meta-Analysis

Critical thinking (CT), or the ability to engage in purposeful, self-regulatory judgment, is widely recognized as an important, even essential, skill. This article describes an ongoing meta-analysis that summarizes the available empirical evidence on the impact of instruction on the development and enhancement of critical thinking skills and dispositions. We found 117 studies based on 20,698 participants, which yielded 161 effects with an average effect size ( g+) of 0.341 and a standard deviation of 0.610. The distribution was highly heterogeneous ( Q T = 1,767.86, p < .001). There was, however, little variation due to research design, so we neither separated studies according to their methodological…