Knowing, Thinking, and Learning: Fostering Critical Thinking in Undergraduate Psychology Classes

We examined the relationship between the levels of sophistication (high-sophisticated and low-sophisticated) of students' domain general epistemic beliefs and an important component of students' critical thinking skills--their ability to evaluate arguments. Participants evaluated arguments and took an epistemic belief survey before recalling arguments in a Surprise Recall task. Our findings suggest that students' general beliefs about the speed of knowledge acquisition predicted how well they evaluated arguments and their memory for critical argument elements (i.e., claim-predicates). Implications of this connection between argument analysis and epistemic beliefs in the context of improving students' critical thinking skills are discussed.