“What Does Critical Thinking Mean to You?” A Narrative Inquiry of Graduate Students’ Perceptions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Critical thinking is an important part of higher education in Canada, and many education systems worldwide, but not all cultural contexts. Critical thinking enables students to expand their perspectives and better navigate important personal and professional decisions. This narrative inquiry compares Canadian and Iranian international graduate students’ perceptions of critical thinking. Through conversations with eight participants, deep and complex transcultural understandings of critical thinking were unearthed. Findings indicate that while Canadian participants can articulate informed viewpoints about critical thinking, some Iranian participants require further knowledge to construct their critical thinking conceptualizations. Results suggest that Canadian higher education needs to consider international students’ limited background knowledge of critical thinking and must provide more opportunities to develop critical thinking skills. This study offers insights for higher education policymakers, curriculum developers, and practitioners to consider international and intercultural perspectives to facilitate critical thinking in both international and domestic students.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.014 | 0.026 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".