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

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.