Abstract
Primary objective: The significance of critical thinking (CT) has grown worldwide in recent years. In teacher education, for example, educators are expected to impart this skill to students but we lack comprehensive international comparative research on CT in pre-service teachers. To begin to develop such assessments, we comparatively analysed CT in Colombia’s and Switzerland’s teacher education intended curricula.
Research design and methodology: We examined 384 curriculum documents at the national (macro), institutional (meso), and course-specific (micro) levels. The documents included 73 from Colombia and 311 from Switzerland. We also conducted interviews with nine teacher educators, four from Colombia and five from Switzerland.
Results: Our analysis revealed that while both countries provide similar opportunities for student teachers to acquire CT skills, there are differences in the percentage of documents that reflect CT or any of its facets, and few university courses include several CT facets.
Conclusion: Our findings suggest the possibility for international CT assessment with appropriate cultural and contextual adaptations. However, the results also highlight the need for better alignment within training curricula and a more cohesive approach to CT, ensuring that CT is not only mentioned in official macro-level documents but is also comprehensively integrated into the micro level.
Ronderos, Natalia