Disposition Towards Critical Thinking, Academic Level, Gender and Problem Solving in Secondary Education

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the possible influence of criticalthinking disposition, academic level and gender (independent variables) on theproblem-solving performance of high school students (dependent variable). Atotal of 114 Spanish secondary school students participated, 55 boys and 59girls, from the 3rd and 4th years of Compulsory Secondary Education (ESO) andthe 1st year of High School (9th, 10th and 11th grade, respectively). All of themwere administered a questionnaire on critical thinking disposition and aproblem-solving test (a PISA test problem). From the Pearson product-momentcorrelation matrix between variables and the backward stepwise regressionanalysis performed, the following conclusions have been derived: 1) thedisposition towards critical thinking (i.e., the potential use of critical thinking)and gender seem to have an insignificant weight on problem-solvingperformance; and 2) academic level shows a very prominent contribution toproblem-solving performance.