The Influence of Epistemological Beliefs and Dispositions on the Development of Critical Thinking

Empirical studies of various pedagogical influences aimed at the development of critical thinking have revealed a problem — regardless of the approach and teaching methods, approximately the same proportion of students who do not demonstrate improvement in their critical thinking skills are recorded. It is suggested that the “critical thinking” construct contains elements that are not usually taken into account in teaching, but which influence the desire of students to develop their critical thinking skills and apply them. The aim of the study was to study the influence of predispositions and epistemological ideas on changing critical thinking skills. The course “Concepts of modern natural science” was transformed for the purposes of the study. The study involved 214 students of different courses of the Faculty of Philology of the Russian Academy of Sciences. It was revealed that critical thinking skills do not improve in students who have absolute or transitional stages of epistemological ideas and a weak development of predispositions “curiosity”, “search for truth”, “open-mindedness”. All students with independent or contextual perception of knowledge and developed predispositions had statistically significantly improved critical thinking skills during the study period. The correlation between changes in skills, predispositions and epistemological concepts has not been revealed: their development trajectories differ significantly. For the purposes of teaching, a conditional model of critical thinking is proposed and justified, which complements existing models by including, in addition to skills, components, predispositions, and the social aspect, epistemological representations through which students perceive knowledge. © 2025 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.