This study provides a systematic review on the Critical Thinking (CT) intervention studies reported in the national literature of the countries involved in the CRITHINKEDU project. The aim of this paper is to characterise critical thinking intervention studies in higher education institutions across different fields. The review process has been carried out by applying content analysis and it is comprised of five stages. A rubric was built in conjunction with a literature review on CT interventions and data analysis. Slight differences were identified among the examined fields. The main results show that immersion is the most frequent approach in all of the fields, followed by infusion, which is only implemented in STEM and social sciences. All of the interventions are short-term and address either CT skills exclusively, or deal with skills and dispositions together. Further research is needed in order to explore which aspects of the CT interventions are successful in the promotion of CT in higher education (HE), as well as the CT components, which are targeted during instruction.

Few people question the important role of critical thinking in students becoming active citizens; however, the way science is taught in schools continues to be more oriented toward “what to think” rather than “how to think.” Researchers understand critical thinking as a tool and a higher-order thinking skill necessary for being an active citizen when dealing with socio-scientific information and making decisions that affect human life, which the pandemic of COVID-19 provides many opportunities for. The outbreak of COVID-19 has been accompanied by what the World Health Organization (WHO) has described as a “massive infodemic.” Fake news covering all aspects of the pandemic spread rapidly through social media, creating confusion and disinformation. This paper reports on an empirical study carried out during the lockdown in Spain (March–May 2020) with a group of secondary students (N = 20) engaged in diverse online activities that required them to practice critical thinking and argumentation for dealing with coronavirus information and disinformation. The main goal is to examine students’ competence at engaging in argumentation as critical assessment in this context. Discourse analysis allows for the exploration of the arguments and criteria applied by students to assess COVID-19 news headlines. The results show that participants were capable of identifying true and false headlines and assessing the credibility of headlines by appealing to different criteria, although most arguments were coded as needing only a basic epistemic level of assessment, and only a few appealed to the criterion of scientific procedure when assessing the headlines.

This paper addresses an explorative case study on Spanish primary pre-service teachers’ (PSTs) emotions about, and their interest in, insects. The study is part of a teachers’ training programme on insects and the problem of the decline in pollinators conducted at the University of Santiago de Compostela, using scientific practice-based learning approach. The research questions are: 1) What are PSTs’ emotions towards insects and what elements mediate these? 2) To what extent are insects interesting for PSTs and what criteria do they use when justifying this interest? 3) Is there a statistically significant association between PSTs’ emotions towards insects and their interest in them? To answer these questions, a content analysis was conducted on individual written responses to an open-ended questionnaire along with statistical analysis. Negative emotions are prevalent among pre-service teachers regarding most insect species, and morphology is the factor most strongly correlated with these negative emotions. A significant association was found between the participants’ interest in insects and the emotions they displayed, demonstrating that the participants’ lack of interest is influenced by their negative emotions. The implications point to the need to design training programmes oriented to help teachers overcome negative emotions and develop an interest in invertebrates.