Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology, Vol 11(2), Jun 2025, 159-173; doi:10.1037/stl0000339
The American Psychological Association (APA) and a recent survey of employers identified critical thinking as one of the most important skills for baccalaureate psychology students to develop. Given recent efforts that have focused on making college education accessible through distance learning, identifying effective pedagogical techniques for developing critical thinking skills in different instructional modalities represents a new problem for educators. Developing online curriculums with similar outcomes to the traditional face-to-face delivery presents many unique challenges and evaluating what constitutes effective teaching of psychological critical thinking in online delivery remains unclear. The purpose of this study was to examine changes in psychological critical thinking in online and traditional face-to-face courses following a 15-min lesson. Three raters scored the revised psychological critical thinking exam (Lawson et al., 2015) to assess pretest and posttest performance of 63 college students enrolled in online and traditional sections of introductory psychology and abnormal psychology at two universities. Data from a 2 × 2 mixed factorial analysis of covariance suggested no significant differences in psychological critical thinking between the online and traditional modalities in the pretest, but a significant difference in critical thinking in the posttest assessment such that critical thinking significantly improved in the online sections. Grade point average (GPA) was a significant predictor of increased performance as well. A short critical thinking intervention may be effective at teaching online students how to think critically when compared to students in a traditional classroom. These results suggest similar interventions may improve critical thinking in undergraduates enrolled in online courses, though limitations exist. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)