Critical thinking Not Applicable
Conditions
Interventions
Recruitment and Randomisation
Students from the School of Psychology undergraduate population will be invited to participate by email and through advertisements on social media. Announcements regardin
Sponsors
National University of Ireland, Galway
Eligibility
Sex/Gender
All
Inclusion criteria
Inclusion criteria: 1. University students at National University of Ireland, Galway 2. 18 to 65 years of age 3. Either English as first language or university-level English (i.e. equivalent to 80 on TOEFL or 6.5 on IELTS; both standardised and recognised tests of English as a foreign language)
Exclusion criteria
Exclusion criteria: 1. Alcohol or drug dependent 2. Currently on any form of sedating medication 3. Have suffered from any medical conditions associated with a head injury, spinal injury, epilepsy, or stroke (because these can interfere with cognitive performance) or do not possess normal or corrected-to-normal vision and hearing (required for computerised tasks) 4. Exhibiting clinical levels of depression, anxiety or psychotic symptoms (as assessed with the Modified Mini Screen) Debriefing phone calls will be made to those excluded and they will be offered access to the intervention materials. An experienced clinician has agreed to provide advice on the management of any participant in whom a high level of emotional distress is identified. Any such participants will also be provided with a database of relevant professionals and professional organisations.
Design outcomes
Primary
| Measure | Time frame |
|---|---|
| Primary measures will be taken at baseline and following the end of the intervention. All of the measures except the Sternberg Working Memory Task will be presented using SurveyGizmo. Halpern Critical Thinking Assessment (HCTA; Halpern, 2010) The HCTA involves 25 real-world situations with closed and open questions based on these situations. These situations involve medical research, social policy analysis and other types of problems encountered in everyday life. Five domains of critical thinking are assessed using the HCTA: Verbal reasoning, argument analysis, thinking as hypothesis testing, likelihood and uncertainty, and decision-making and problem-solving. The test includes 5 sets of questions (one open and one closed) for each of these domains. The scoring guide provides answers for forced-choice questions while open-ended questions are graded according to specific grading prompts (for more detail see Dwyer, Hogan, & Stewart, 2012). Greater scores are awarded to more accurate and comprehensive answers and total scores can range from 0 to 194 (Halpern, 2010). The internal reliability of the HTCA tends to be adequate (Dwyer et al., 2012; Halpern, 2010). Heuristics and Biases items (West, Toplak, & Stanovich, 2008) This series of standard items assessing cognitive biases is included as there is evidence that these assess an aspect of critical thinking not captured by traditional measures (West et al., 2008). These items assess participants’ ability to deal with problems involving causal base rates, noncausal base rates, the law of large numbers, regression to the mean, the gambler’s fallacy, conjunctions, covariation, Bayesian reasoning, framing and probabilistic reasoning (for full details of the items see West et al., 2008). Each of these items will be scored as either correct (1) or incorrect (0). Though these are not representative of a unidimensional construct, it has been shown to be useful to aggregate scores on these items (West et al., 2008). Five | — |
Secondary
| Measure | Time frame |
|---|---|
| Secondary measures will assess effects on wellbeing in order to compare with previous studies employing Headspace and will be taken at baseline and follow-up. All of the measures except the Sternberg Working Memory Task will be presented using SurveyGizmo. Sternberg working memory task (Sternberg, 1975) This task is a measure of executive control of working memory. It involves memorising a series of letters and indicating, as quickly and accurately as possible, whether a probe was in this series or not. Positive Affect and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS; Watson & Clark, 1994) This scale is the most widely-used instrument for assessing inter- and intra-individual differences in experiences of positive and negative emotion. The PANAS-X consists of 60 items. Each item describes a different feeling or emotion and the scale can be used to assess general levels of positive and negative affect by asking participants to indicate to what extent they felt each of these emotions over the past week using a 5-point Likert scale (e.g. 1 = very slightly or not at all; 5 = extremely). Psychometric evaluations tend to find good reliability for the positive and negative subscales (Simmons & Lehmann, 2012). Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale (Tennant et al., 2007) This is a 14-item scale of mental well-being covering subjective well-being and psychological functioning, in which all items are worded positively and address aspects of positive mental health. The scale is scored by summing responses to each item answered on a 5-point Likert scale. The minimum scale score is 14 and the maximum is 70. A high score reflects a high level of positive mental health and a low score reflects a low level of positive mental health (Stewart-Brown & Janmohamed, 2008). Real World Outcomes Inventory (Butler et al., 2012) This is a behavioural checklist focused on life outcomes from many domains ranging in severity from mildly negative (e.g., paying late fees for a movie rental) to sever | — |
Countries
Ireland
Contacts
Public ContactChris Noone
Outcome results
None listed