Critical thinking is a central element in higher education, designed to respond to authentic challenges that our society currently faces: the emergence and spread of fake news, disinformation, and manipulation. There is a consensus regarding CT’s importance and role in higher education. Nevertheless, CT skills are often implicitly mentioned and only occasionally included in university curricula explicitly. The present paper aims at analysing how CT can be measured and tested in higher education, and it proposes specific tasks designed to increase the use of CT within the theoretical framework defined by Peter Facione and Paul Elder. Updated course descriptions were tested, and students’ feedback was analysed and discussed. CT was measured by pre-questionnaires, mid-questionnaires, and post-questionnaires to establish the effectiveness of coherently implementing CT into the course descriptions. The survey includes answers to open questions to determine the suitability of the tasks proposed. The present research is part of the international Erasmus project “Critical Thinking for Successful Jobs”.

This paper analyzes the different viewpoints of the participants in four focus groups discussing critical thinking (CT) in teaching/studying foreign languages. Three of them were conducted at Vilnius University and one at the Public Service Language Centre in Vilnius, Lithuania. All of the interviewees agree about the importance of critical thinking, although they define it differently and emphasize a number of various aspects needed for its acquisition and application. Both students/trainees and instructors/trainers describe several classroom activities that stimulate CT and suggest implicit and explicit methods for evaluating it. The focus group discussions were conducted as part of the international projects Think4Jobs, whose main task was to determine the gap between CT as it is taught at institutions of higher education and in the labor market. Answering this question, the participants mention the unpredictability of the labor market, the usefulness of CT for many different jobs and the importance of teaching it for the acquisition of foreign languages.

Thesis/Aim. One of the major aims of universities is to prepare graduates to be independent critical thinkers who can make research-based decisions and contribute to the development of democracy. Labor market institutions also expect their employees to think critically. Therefore, university curricula should focus not only on developing students’ discipline-specific competencies but general competencies as well. The foreign language teaching and learning process is considered to provide favorable conditions for the development of students’ critical thinking skills especially when the curriculum is based on an action-oriented approach. This study investigates whether critical thinking is effectively integrated into the foreign language teaching-learning process in higher education and its alignment with labor market expectations. Method. A qualitative empirical approach involved documental analysis of course descriptions and lecture observations at a higher education institution. The research instrument was an observational sheet containing a rubric listing the variables and indicators of critical thinking development. Results. The research revealed that the emphasis on critical thinking in foreign language teaching is more implicit than explicit. Conclusions. While critical thinking is recognized as an essential learning outcome in university curricula, its practical implementation in foreign language education requires further refinement to make its focus more explicit.