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A Systematic Review on E-learning Environments for Promoting Critical Thinking in Higher Education

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Handbook of Research in Educational Communications and Technology

Abstract

Trends in educational research indicate an increasing interest in how learning environments and teaching strategies may influence the development of critical thinking (CT). E-learning environments facilitate the opportunity to use constructivist perspectives and personalized learning regardless of time and space boundaries. Moreover, they foster CT since students have to deal with unlimited access to knowledge. This chapter presents a systematic review on CT interventions through e-learning to answer two research questions: (1) What are the characteristics of e-learning environments interventions intended to promote CT in higher education (HE)? (2) Which characteristics of those e-learning environments contribute most to successful instructional models for the development of CT? For addressing these research questions, a systematic review was done through a content analysis from a corpus of 19 papers. Results of the first research question show that blended learning is the most common approach and e-learning activities are based, predominantly, on asynchronous discussions about real-life situations. Concerning the second research question, we pay attention to those papers that assess CT explicitly to get a clear idea about how CT skills and dispositions improve. Forums, cooperative or collaborative learning and discussions about real-life problems seems to promote students’ development of CT. Drawing from this review, some challenges are identified related to CT assessment, dispositions, and diverse variables that might affect CT development, which should be considered in further research.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank the reviewers for their valuable comments, which have helped to improve the chapter. Work supported by FEDER/ Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities – National Agency of Research, ESPIGA project (“Promoviendo el Desarrollo de Pensamiento Crítico y de las Dimensiones de Implicación Cognitiva y Emocional de los Desempeños Epistémicos en las clases de Ciencias en la Era de la Post-verdad”), code PGC 2018-096581-B-C22. 

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  1. Departamento de Didácticas Aplicadas, Área de Didáctica de las Ciencias Experimentales, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela (USC), Santiago de Compostela, Spain

    Blanca Puig, Paloma Blanco Anaya & Inés M. Bargiela

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  1. Blanca Puig
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  2. Paloma Blanco Anaya
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  3. Inés M. Bargiela
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Correspondence to Blanca Puig .

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  1. Kirwan Center for Academic Innovation, University System of Maryland, Adelphi, MD, USA

    M. J. Bishop

  2. Instructional Systems Technology, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA

    Elizabeth Boling

  3. Education and Training, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Jan Elen

  4. Organization, Information & Learning Sciences, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA

    Vanessa Svihla

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Puig, B., Blanco Anaya, P., Bargiela, I.M. (2020). A Systematic Review on E-learning Environments for Promoting Critical Thinking in Higher Education. In: Bishop, M.J., Boling, E., Elen, J., Svihla, V. (eds) Handbook of Research in Educational Communications and Technology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36119-8_15

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