Teaching and Assessing Critical Thinking in Higher Education: A Cross-Disciplinary Study

Abstract

Harnessing students’ 21st-century skills has broadly been the core discussion of recent educational reform worldwide. Pertaining to this, soft skills have gained attention and become an increasingly important cornerstone of higher education discourse. Among these skills, critical thinking plays a crucial role across disciplines; however, research has examined its teaching and assessment practices from a single angle, overlooking the role of academic disciplines in shaping these aspects. Correspondingly, this qualitative study examines the potential differences in the teaching and assessment of critical thinking in two contrasting disciplines, namely Mathematics and English Studies. Data were collected through a qualitative survey questionnaire with fourteen professors of English Studies and Mathematics at École Normale Supérieure, Moulay Ismail University of Meknes. The findings reveal clear disciplinary differences in how critical thinking is conceptualized and enacted. While both disciplines highly value critical thinking, they understand and implement it differently. These differences relate to discipline-specific epistemologies and structural constraints. Consequently, this study’s findings may provide a basis for further research into how discipline-specific epistemologies and structural constraints shape the teaching and assessment of critical thinking.