Critical thinking practices in teacher education programmes: a systematic review

Promoting students' critical thinking is an important task of Teacher Education. This is a review paper of 39 research papers regarding the critical thinking practices that are utilised in Teacher Education programmes, including instructional approaches and strategies, ways of assessment, their results, and the factors that affect their success. Both the description and the results of the studies, as well as researchers' interpretations/discussion of their findings, are content analysed based on the construction of an analysis chart. A critical analysis of the characteristics of interventions according to the results and researchers' opinions shows that a variety of factors affect their success. Thus, the personal (i.e. students' learning style and motivation), methodological (i.e. methods, tools, duration, feedback), and contextual (i.e. classroom climate, supportive initiatives) features of the intervention are important for effective CT instruction and the improvement of student teachers' CT skills and dispositions.