CRITICAL THINKING IN A BIOSCIENCE STUDENT POPULATION IN UK: QUALITATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE ASSESSMENT OF CRITICAL THINKING ABILITY (ACTA) SURVEY

Last year I presented the first part of this study, whose aim is to explore Bioscience Undergraduate (UG) students' perceptions and understanding of what critical thinking is. The rationale being a gap in the current and past literature on critical thinking (CT): a systematic review on the topic for my Master in Academic Practice in Higher Education. The aim is finding potential underlying reasons of why so many Higher Education (HE) students experience difficulty approaching the world of scientific knowledge with a critical attitude. In most science degrees critically analyzing and developing opinions are not fostered; students are mostly passive recipients; the importance of questioning in science is overlooked; Science education across many countries favour the 'what we know' compared to the 'how we know'. Students' perspectives on CT are important because: 1) To understand our feedback they need to share with us the meaning of CT; 2) We can support them in developing CT once we know what it means for them; 3) If CT for the students is a grey area, we can improve our teaching of CT skills. This part of the study presents critical abilities tested in the Assessment of Critical Thinking Ability (ACTA) (Brian White, 2011) survey, which are: 1) integrating studies presenting opposite/conflicting views; 2) designing experiments to resolve uncertainties and ambiguities; 3) imagining possible alternative interpretations to the causes of a Disease X. The survey is designed to generate quantitative data with 4 being the maximum overall score. 159 3Y UG students answered it. Four questions out of eleven allow for open-ended answers: some of the 636 open-ended answers were also qualitatively evaluated and their analysis is presented this year.