Critical thinking is a 21st century skill considered essential for today’s students to navigate the Information Age and for their future work life.

But how well does the education system encourage the development of these skills?

In a recent study tasks measuring digital media literacy were administered at an international school in Finland to consider the efficacy and transfer of critical thinking skills. The task instruments utilised in the study were earlier developed by the Stanford History Education Group to determine the extent to which young people ask ‘Who is behind the information?’ and ‘What is the evidence?’ in scenarios taken from real world online situations.

The executive summary published by the Stanford researchers in winter of 2016 received widespread coverage from major news outlets around the world due to its corresponding with the advent of the ‘fake news’ phenomenon, as well as for the Stanford researchers describing U.S. student performance as ‘dismaying’ and ‘bleak’.

– Many of the international outlets generalised the results of the U.S. students to their own socio-educational environments, which our more recent study cautions against, comment Shane Horn and Koen Veermans, who conducted the Finnish study at the University of Turku.

In this recent study two cohorts were measured: a pre-IB cohort preparing to enter the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme, and a separate cohort preparing to graduate from the programme.

While the graduating IB2 cohort only slightly outperformed the entry level pre-IB cohort, both outperformed the compared Stanford’s U.S. cohorts to a statistically significant degree.

– This study was largely to see if progress in the IB programme correlated with better performance on the tasks, as would be expected, and which to some extent indeed occurred. What became more interesting was how drastic the differentials were between both the cohorts tested in Finland when compared to student performance by the U.S. cohorts, says Shane Horn.

– The results on several tasks were like negative mirror images of one another, with the students in Finland performing at the mastery level to the extent the students in the U.S. performed at beginning levels, Horn explains.