Critical-Thinking Assessment Table: A Novel Strategy to Foster Students’ Critical Thinking Dispositions

Critical-thinking dispositions are constant inner impulses to use critical-thinking in the process of decision-making. Thus, critical-thinking dispositions are integral to drive and maintain students’ use of critical-thinking in their academic and daily life setting. Yet, critical-thinking dispositions have received small attention from researchers. From the literature, there appear to be few strategies that are effective to foster students’ critical-thinking dispositions. In this article, a design research developed and tested a novel strategy aimed to foster three Indonesian Master Students’ critical-thinking dispositions. The strategy represented by a table consisting of a set of critical-thinking criteria and phases of critical-thinking self-regulation. The strategy intended to make explicit and to enhance the students’ metacognition and self-regulation in the process of critical-thinking. Scores retrieved from critical-thinking dispositions scale shows that the intervention successfully increased the overall students’ level of critical-thinking dispositions. The qualitative data from individual interviews revealed some valuable insights about the students’ learning difficulties and that the strategy successfully made students aware of their thinking process and reinforced the students’ metacognition and self-regulation process. The limitation and implication of the strategy are discussed.