Critical thinking and Chinese higher education: assessing the value of the Western critical thinking tradition for recent developments in Chinese higher education

Wang, Hui (2026) Critical thinking and Chinese higher education: assessing the value of the Western critical thinking tradition for recent developments in Chinese higher education. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow.

Abstract

Critical thinking is widely recognised as an important aim of higher education, yet less clarity exists about how it is conceptualised and taught at course level, especially across different educational contexts. This thesis examines critical thinking teaching in Western and Chinese higher education through the three dimensions of teaching purposes, course content, and teaching methods. The purpose of this comparison is to identify the features of a critical thinking course that would be workable and context-sensitive in Chinese higher education. It poses three questions: What teaching purposes, content, and methods characterise critical thinking teaching in Western and Chinese higher education? What similarities and differences exist between these two contexts? And what aspects of Western critical thinking teaching may support the further development of critical thinking courses in Chinese higher education?
The study adopts a mixed-methods design and draws on multiple sources of evidence. These include an international scoping review of critical thinking teaching in higher education, a review of Chinese research on critical thinking in higher education, analyses of Western and Chinese university syllabuses, an analysis of Western critical thinking textbooks, a survey of Western higher education teachers, and an analysis of Chinese national education policy texts. Taken together, these sources make it possible to examine critical thinking teaching from several connected levels: published research, course design, teaching materials, practitioner perspectives, and government policy.
The findings show that Western critical thinking teaching displays a relatively stable course configuration. Across the international literature and the selected Western datasets of syllabuses, textbooks, and teacher accounts, the evidence converges around analytical skill development as the central curricular purpose, argument analysis as the core content line, and active learning as the dominant teaching mechanism. The study further suggests that more developed course designs often extend this core through supplementary components concerned with cognitive psychology, constructive dialogue, and probability. The Chinese evidence also shows strong emphasis on analysis and argumentation, alongside broader policy aims such as innovation and talent cultivation, but course boundaries are less stable, meaning that critical thinking is less consistently framed as a distinct course domain and shows greater variation in how aims, content, and teaching procedures are specified, with fewer explicit operational routines in teaching practice.
On this basis, the thesis argues that the main value of Western approaches to critical thinking teaching for Chinese higher education lies not in direct transfer, but in its clearer curricular logic: the coherent alignment of teaching purposes, content and methods. The study proposes an evidence-informed course design for Chinese higher education built around a stable argument-analytical core, supported by active learning and supplemented by content addressing cognitive bias, dialogic engagement, and probabilistic judgement. In doing so, the proposed design connects the Western course logic identified in the thesis with Chinese policy priorities and course-level needs. The thesis concludes that the development of critical thinking courses in China depends not only on recognising critical thinking as an important educational aim, but also on translating that aim into bounded, teachable, and assessable course structures that support both analytical performance and the development of appropriate critical thinking dispositions.
This study contributes to research on critical thinking in higher education by providing a course-level comparative analysis of selected Western and Chinese materials, with the Western evidence serving primarily to reconstruct a relatively stable course logic and the Chinese evidence helping to assess its relevance, limits, and possible adaptation in context; by bringing together multiple forms of evidence; and by offering a clearer basis for understanding how critical thinking may be organised as a university course. Its conclusions are strongest in relation to curricular structure, comparative tendencies, and course development, rather than to classroom effectiveness or student learning outcomes, which remain for future research.

• Item Type: Thesis (PhD)
• Qualification Level: Doctoral
• Subjects: L Education > LB Theory and practice of education > LB2300 Higher Education
• Colleges/Schools: College of Social Sciences > School of Social & Environmental Sustainability
• Supervisor's Name: Hanscomb, Dr. Stuart and Krawczyk, Dr. Marian
• Date of Award: 2026
• Depositing User: Theses Team
• Unique ID: glathesis:2026-86203
• Copyright: Copyright of this thesis is held by the author.
• Date Deposited: 31 Aug 2026 08:05
• Last Modified: 31 Aug 2026 08:07
• Thesis DOI: 10.5525/gla.thesis.86203
• URI: https://theses.gla.ac.uk/id/eprint/86203

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