Arts and Humanities as a Source of Critical Thinking Development

Abstract

In this paper, I shall present a literature review concerning critical thinking (CT) in Arts and Humanities. The method employed had three phases: i) database and keywords identification, ii) selection of papers for analysis and review, iii) data-extraction and analysis. And the following inclusion criteria were taken into consideration: a) only peer-review articles concerning CT and Higher Education (HE); b) empirical-based and theoretical papers research were also included; c) articles which met quality criteria: explaining the methodological design, argued opinions, variated sources. I did not exclude papers based on the year of publication. I selected a diversity of papers, proceedings, book chapters, dissertations, articles, because of the limited bibliographic resources and also for providing a broader view of the literature. The study revealed that the most frequent research question in the analyzed papers was that Arts and Humanities help in developing CT skills and disposition. On the other hand, in other domains, like STEM or Social Sciences, critical thinking helps to improve one’s activity in the respective domain, and not vice versa (one specific domain is improving CT). The conclusion is that critical thinking is a complex reality that it is not a general domain called Critical Thinking which is impacting upon the specific domains, but the other way around. In the Arts and the Humanities the critical attitude, which is specific to each of those domains, builds up to a more general Critical Thinking skill.

Keywords: critical thinking, Arts, Humanities, higher education

Full text

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ARTS AND HUMANITIES AS A SOURCE OF CRITICAL THINKING
DEVLOPMENT
Daniela Dumitru
Assoc. Prof., The Bucharest University of Economic Studies, ROMANIA, daniela.dumitru@ase.ro
Abstract
The paper is a part of a larger effort converged within a research project funded by the European
Commission (Critical Thinking across European Higher Education Curricula – CRITHINKEDU, which looks
for evidence that Critical Thinking is a specific domain and if there are different opinions among experts
(employers, teachers, researchers) on what Critical Thinking should bring to their domain.
Methodologically, the present research is an exploratory literature review, an attempt of systematicity, that
tries to put together in one place the preoccupations and results of worldwide researchers in Humanities,
Arts and Culture regarding the role of Critical Thinking in their domains.
The results showed an unexpected situation, the main research question in the analysed papers is not how
critical thinking is making us better artists or Humanities experts, but how these fields make us better critical
thinkers. Searching for generic key terms like Humanities, didn‟t return much relevant information, but
searching for specific domains, like Literature, History, Linguistics, Philosophy had a better chance of finding
papers concerning Critical Thinking.
It means that the topic is far more complex that it looked at first glance and it requires special attention on
each case or sub-domain.
Keywords: Critical thinking, Critical thinking dispositions, Higher education, Humanities, Arts.
1 INTRODUCTION
The present article was the result of the decision taken by the research team from project Critical thinking
across European higher education curricula – CRITHINKEDU (2016-2019). The team had in mind to draw
from, but not limited to, the second research report, informally named O2 report, A European review on
critical thinking educational practices in higher education institutions (Dominguez (coord.) 2018). This
concerns a literature review of critical thinking (CT) practices, interventions to develop this ability in the
European higher education space. The assumption of the research team of the project is that CT should be
included in university classes, according to domains, adapted to the specificity of each subject. The reason is
that we believe that CT should help students to be better in their field, and subsequently, a general class in
CT is not helping at all, because the transfer of CT skills is problematic, and it is still lacking a whole body of
research.
One of the strong points of the project was the fact that it will consider Arts, Culture and Humanities related
to CT into the empirical research. The methodological design adopted in the CRITHINKEDU project is a

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systematic literature review, and included three steps: databases and keywords identification, selection of
papers for analysis, review, data extraction and analysis (Dominguez (coord.) 2018 11-13). However, the
present paper cannot follow the same methodological strategy, because the results from the literature are
poorly represented and all I could accomplish, given the findings, was an exploratory review. It is not
possible to identify the categories assumed in CRITHINKEDU project or to find some CT definition that is
currently in use among the experts, including myself.
The search of the keywords proved to be a challenge, because no relevant papers appeared when search
for “Humanities”, “Culture” or “Arts” plus critical thinking. The search was fruitful when searching for
“Literature”, “History”, “Acting”, “Philosophy” etc., each taken separately, avoiding global denominations of
fields.
Briefly, I can conclude that each domain has “domains” and I shall provide an insight on this issue later, in
the theoretical section. So critical thinking has differentiations in respect of its authors‟ research preferences,
and it was difficult to find an explanation for this scattered and counterintuitive landscape of topics and
approaches. The article turned out to be just a review, without the pretense of systematicity. I named the
article “an improbable review” because I cannot decide if it is a review or just an introduction to a vast realm
that must be judged more thoroughly, studying each case separately (see Wittgenstein 1998).
2 THE CONCEPT OF CRITICAL THINKING
The definition of critical thinking requires an interdisciplinary perspective: philosophical (logical-
philosophical), psychological and educational.
The newest and most influent views of today, are representing three domains: philosophy (the argumentation
theory and epistemology – Dewey (1910, reprint 2012), Ennis (1989, 1990, 1991), Glaser (1984) and Paul
(1998), psychology (critical disposition and attitude – Glaser, Ennis and Paul) and education sciences
(Glaser, Ennis and Paul).
Therefore, we can state that thinking critically is a skill, a sum of psychological features, which allow their
possessor to successfully carry out an educational, social or technical activity. The skills that form, compose
or are included in the name of “critical thinking” are the object of this study.
Most authors agree that thinking critically means to reason, to justify, to argue, not to take everything as
definitive, static, immutable, to seek the foundations of some statements, to debate and ask, to ask for proofs
and assess them. This fact inevitably leads us towards logics and especially argumentation, which,
according to D. Stoianovici, is the central component of critical thinking: “… the availability to argue one‟s
own assertions and to ask others for arguments, together with the skill to weigh the relevance and value of
these arguments represents the central component of critical thinking” (Stoianovici, 2005, p. 27). This focus
on logics and argumentation, on the assessment of reasoning and proofs, on reasoning as key component,
makes the majority of tests that measure critical thinking be centered on assessing the dimension of the
reasoning and argumentation of critical thinking (Cornell Critical Thinking Test, Watson-Glaser Critical
Thinking Appraisal, Law School Admission Test, California Critical Thinking Skills Test etc.).
In 1980, J. J. Michael, W. Michael and R. Devaney, in their article on the factorial validity of the Cornell
Critical Thinking Test (Ennis and Millman, 1972), stated that there wasn‟t any widely accepted definition of
critical thinking and quoted some studies. Penfold and Abou-Hatab (1967) claimed that the ability to evaluate
was critical thinking.
Over the last twenty years, American teachers and politicians have started national programs of introducing
critical thinking as a general objective and as a final product of K-12. Among the initiators, there are:
Facione, 1990, Kuhn, 1999, Lipman, 1987 and U.S. Department of Education, 1990 (Giancarlo et al., 2004,
p. 348).
In 1988, the Delphi Project started. It was financed by the American Philosophical Association and gathered
an interdisciplinary team of specialists (philosopher, teachers, psychologists, sociologists, critical thinking
specialists, assessment specialists, an economist, a computer science specialist, a zoologist and a
physician). Its aim was to conceptualize “critical thinking”. The official title of this project was Critical
Thinking: A Statement of Expert Consensus for Purposes of Educational Assessment and Instruction.
Here is the entire Delphi definition: critical thinking is purposeful, self-regulatory judgment, which results in
interpretation, analysis, evaluation, and inference, as well as explanation of the evidential, conceptual,
methodological, criteriological, or contextual considerations upon which that judgment is based. The
definition continues with: critical thinking is an essential tool of inquiry (which also has the meaning of

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research, interrogation or question). It becomes more and more interesting, because it unfolds the
implications in the personal and social plane of the critical thinking, stating that: critical thinking is a liberating
force in education and a powerful resource in one‟s personal and civic life. The Delphi Project experts claim
that thinking critically is not the equivalent of thinking correctly.
The Delphi Project experts believe that the following set of cognitive skills represents the main dimensions of
critical thinking: Analysis, Interpretation, Evaluation, Inference, Explanation, Self-regulation.
According to these experts, all these cognitive dimensions represent the foundation and specific of the
critical thinking. These skills are high order thinking skills.
Richard Paul (1993) makes an interesting distinction between the strong sense and the weak sense of
critical thinking. He considers critical thinking in the weak sense that sophistic thinking used by a person to
defend certain interests of his and to highlight the weak points in others‟, judgment, the opponents‟, without
applying the same (rational) treatments to his own arguments. In other words, critical thinking in the weak
sense represents an instrument pointed towards the exterior, an instrument used as a weapon.
The second dimension of critical thinking is the disposition toward critical thinking. This dimension requires
especially to the psychological perspective on critical thinking, as it lays emphasis on complex psychological
realities such as attitudes, motivations and affectivity and on the value, personal-characterial side.
There is why critical thinking is not only cognition or argumentation, but a complex psychological reality that
can be described in terms of a personality dimension. In other words, we have a set of cognitive skills that
we activate depending on our interests, attitudes, motivation and feelings toward an outer or inner reality. We
have an energetic source through which we activate our cognitive skills in a certain moment.
After reaching a consensus through the Delphi method, here is how experts describe the dispositions or
characteristics of a good critical thinker: he commits and encourages the others to commit to critical
judgment; he is capable of such judgments in a wide area of contexts and a variety of purposes (Facione,
1990, p. 12). The experts make up a list of affective dispositions that define a good critical thinker, divided
into two categories:
I. Affective dispositions regarding life and the quotidian in general: inquisitiveness about a wide range of
issues, concern to become and remain generally well-informed, etc.
II. Affective dispositions regarding themes, matters and specific questions: the desire for clarity in stating the
questions and considerations, the need for orderliness in approaching matters and complex subjects are
among them.
It is possible for someone to possess the logical and cognitive means to think critically and despite all these,
to not do it. Contemporary studies on critical thinking admit the fact that any discussion about critical thinking
must include cognitive skills as well as cognitive attitudes or dispositions (Ennis and Norris, 1990). The
phrase “disposition toward critical thinking” refers to a person‟s inner motivation toward critical thinking when
confronted with solving problems, evaluating ideas and making decisions (Facione et al., 1997, apud.
Giancarlo, 2004).
Critical thinking implies an open spirit willing to evaluate as even-handedly as possible the grounds of the
discussed opinions. J. Dewey said that the open spirit consists of the active desire to listen to all the parts of
the dispute, to take into consideration the facts, regardless of the one who presents them, to provide
maximum attention to the alternative possibilities, to acknowledge the possibility of error even when
concerning beliefs we care about a lot. Of course, that changing one‟s own opinions too often is not a
desirable thing, as it means that they were not supported by solid grounds. However, consistency at all costs
is also to be avoided, as it does not signal rationality, but obstinacy, obtuseness and infatuation (Stoianovici,
2005). Critical spirit is opposed to radical skepticism, because it would be a position that cancels itself,
because the radical skeptic, in order to be logical, must doubt even his own posture. It is also opposed to
dogmatism, because it pretends to be the keeper of the ultimate truth and therefore, it is argumentation-
proof.
Being defined as it is, the critical spirit makes a person to be open to new, alert, alive and dynamic in
judgment approachable on different discussion themes, flexible and willing to improve. Eduard de Bono, in
his Thinking Course (1982, reedited in 1995), is in opposition with critical thinking, stating that reasoning is
not everything. By this, he understands that any practical course of critical thinking is sterile, unless
reasoning or critical thinking are not put in the service of finding new possibilities, for supporting or founding
new ideas, changing mentalities or alluring the “outside of the box” judgment. Nothing that was taught at that

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class would be applied in everyday life if the argumentation habits learned during the course are not put in
the service of finding new solutions and alternatives.
3 METHOD
The research question is to find if CT has a positive impact on artistic skills, or for Arts students in general,
and if CT has a positive impact on Humanities and Culture Studies students.
The method employed had three phases: Database and keywords identification, Selection of papers for
analysis and Review, data-extraction and analysis (Bennet et. al. 2005). See the Annex 1.
A. Database and keywords identification
(1) The first phase: searching for the general terms of the domains (Humanities, Arts and Culture) plus
critical thinking. It was not very successful in finding papers. Searching for the general terms of the
domains (Humanities, Arts and Culture) plus critical thinking returned Medical Humanities for
Humanities, so 0 (zero) relevant papers for this study. Art classes, which are “critical for the
development”, for Arts plus CT, also 0 (zero) relevant papers. Culture plus CT returned papers
containing also the word “studies” (cultural studies), and I kept two of them, which met the analysis
criteria (see below).
(2) The second phase: search for specific sub-domains of each field: Literature, Literature criticism,
History, Philosophy, Ethics, Aesthetics, Visual art, Music, Musical criticism, Performing Arts, Theatre,
Rhetoric.
Databases were the usual selected ones in this type of research: Web of Science, SCOPUS, EBSCO, and
Google search engine.
B. Selection of papers for analysis
The following inclusion criteria were pursued: a) only peer-review articles concerning CT and Higher
Education (HE); b) empirical-based and theoretical papers research were also included; c) articles which met
quality criteria: explaining the methodological design, argued opinions, variated sources. I did not exclude
papers based on the year of publication and also, I did not exclude other types of papers, other than articles.
So, proceedings, book chapters, dissertations, etc. were taken into consideration because of the limited
bibliographic resources, also for providing a more diverse literature input).
C. Review, data-extraction and analysis
The dimensions for paper analysis tried to identify (Dominguez (coord.) 2018, p. 12):
(1) Type of study (quantitative, qualitative or mixed)
(2) Type of program (bachelor, MA, PhD or post-doctoral)
(3) Field
(4) CT skills and dispositions (Facione, 1990)
(5) CT instruction approach (Ennis, 1989)
(6) Type of intervention (Abrami et. al., 2008)
(7) Teaching strategies (Ennis, 1989)
(8) Learning materials (Abrami et.al., 2008)
(9) Evaluation of learning
(10) Learning results and difficulties.
The first three dimensions were easy to follow into the analysis, but the rest are scarce, only a few papers
displaying them, as you will see in the following chapters. The analysis follows an exploratory pathway, I
have referred to the criteria stated above, and I have mainly presented the key points in every article,
exploring and explaining how the authors demonstrate that Arts, Humanities and Cultures contribute to the
development of critical thinking.
4 RESULTS
A total of 35 papers were found. All medical humanities papers were excluded, all four were interventions

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and empirical studies. Three papers from the Humanities were also excluded, being about pre-university
education. The rest of 28 papers were analyzed, and they are grouped, to keep the coherence, into the three
categories referred throughout the paper: Humanities 11, Arts 15 and Culture 3.
A lot of literature is referring to „medical or health humanities‟ (Kooken and Kerr 2018, McCaffrey 2016,
Macneill 2017, Liao and Wang 2016). The reason of the recent development of this domain is „to provide
more humanizing medical care‟ (Liao and Wang 2016). I shall not develop further discussion about this
domain, although very interesting, because it involves Biomedical Sciences, which is not our topic. These
papers were excluded. Three other papers (Eldridge 2016, Silvers 2001 and Tomlison 1998) contained the
searched terms, but the content had nothing to do with the searched topic, meaning, the relationship
between Humanities and CT. Also, they have been excluded.
Table 1. Number of papers on domains and sub-domains
Domain
Sub-domain
No. of Papers
Analyzed
Excluded
Total
Arts
Art / Art education
7
0
7
Art Critics / Aesthetics
4
0
1
Performing Arts
1
0
1
Painting
1
0
1
Sculpture
1
0
1
Music
2
0
2
Humanities
Literature
6
7
13
Critics
1
0
1
Digital Literature
1
0
1
History
1
0
1
Philosophy
2
0
2
Culture
3
0
3
Table 2: List of analyzed papers
Domain
Sub-domain
Analyzed
Observations
Arts
Art / Art
education
1. Halpern, D. 2013.
Book
2. Hogarth W. 1909.
Book
3. Lampert, N. 2006.
Article
4. Lampert, N. 2011.
Article
5. Ulger, K. 2018.
Article
6. Knight, H. 2014.
Article
Art Critics /
Aesthetics
7. Noor, H. and Samsudin, Z. 2016.
Article
8. Subramaniam, M., Hanafi, J. and Putih,
A. T. 2016
Article
9. Tucker, J. L. 2007
Article
10. Hurwitz, A. 1994
Article
Performing
Arts
11. Chappell S.V. and Chappell D. 2016.
Article
Painting
12. Velde, B. P.2008.
Book chapter
Sculpture
13. Lampert, N. 2011.
Article. Also in Art
Education
Music
14. Pogonowski, L. 1989.
Article
15. Kilic, I., Yazici, T. and Topalak, S.I. 2017.
Article

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Humanities
Literature
1. Lyubomirov. S. 2017
Article
2. Gilroy, M. and Parkinson, B. 1997.
Article
3. Ruggerio, V.R. 2001.
Article
4. Paul, R. 1998.
Article
5. Prinsloo, C. 2018.
Article
6. Daud, N.M and Husin, Z. 2004.
Article
Critics
7. Rubin, S. 2013.
Article
Digital
Literature
8. Yang, Y. C. and Wu, W., I.2012.
Article
History
9. McLaughlin, A. C and McGill, A. E. 2017.
Article
Philosophy
10. Huber C. and Kuncel N. R. 2016.
Article
11. Ortiz, C.M.A. 2007.
Article
Culture
Cultural
Studies
1. Lun, M. V., Fischer R. and Ward, C. 2010.
Article
2. Chiu, Y. J. 2009.
Article
3. Tiwari, A., Avery, A. and Lai, P. 2003.
Article
5 DISCUSSION
In the following I shall discuss and interpret the content of the papers selected for the analysis, presented in
three sub-chapters, Critical thinking and the Arts, Critical thinking and Humanities, and Critical thinking and
Culture. It is necessary to mention that in the Discussion chapter I refer to other papers also, that are not
selected for analysis, but as tools for interpretation.
5.1 Critical Thinking and the Arts
I find that the most challenging part of this article is critical thinking and the Arts. Well, there are no “Arts” like
there are no “people” as an item. So, I had to split my search in domains referring to specific artistic
manifestations (the ones I could think): Music, Painting, Performing arts, Sculpture, Art education, Art
education adding „critics‟ to all domains.
The missing link between Arts and CT is, probably, creativity (or creative thinking). As we can find in Diane‟s
Halpern book (2013), creative thinking has to be a part of extensive CT papers, like books and monographs.
The art theory is discussing whether artistic emotions are related to subjective or objective facts, meaning
that the beauty is ontological or is fictitious? Is this a reality to which we all agree upon? Or there is an
objective fact that produces beauty and everybody can see this objective beauty into painting, cf. W. Hogarth
(1909, retrieved from
https://ia902706.us.archive.org/6/items/analysisbeauty00hogagoog/analysisbeauty00hogagoog.pdf). This is
the breaking point of CT and Art. Is fact-checking, truth-loving critical thinking relevant for an artistic mind?
However, a paper showed that there is a link between CT and Art, but as Art critics or Aesthetics. Findings
from a survey conducted in three Malaysian public universities revealed that less than 30 % of the
undergraduate art students are able to analyse works of art critically. Studies show how art criticism
improves CT skills, but it is also a tool for improving artistic criticism, so there is no clear demarcation of
which influences which (Noor and Samsudin 2016).
In an interesting study, we find out that the dispositions of critical thinking are an outcome of art education,
meaning that undergraduate students in Arts have increased scores on CCDTI (California Critical Thinking
Disposition Inventory, Facione 1992) in comparison to non-Arts students on truth-seeking, maturity, and
open-mindedness. (Lampert 2006, 215-228). No mention of teaching methods or the fact that CT may
improve artistic skills. She says that in the literature on education and critical thinking indicates that an
inquiry-based curriculum positively influences gains in critical thinking. Similarly, learning in the arts is largely
inquiry-based. The results showed that the exposure to learning in the arts positively influences students‟
disposition to think critically. I want to emphasize the fact that most of papers that link CT and Arts are in
educational field and, no surprise there, modern HE teaching should be preoccupied to teach critically in
order to educate for the 21st Century needs (World Economic Forum 2016). Lampert (2011) proposes an
experimental design where eight undergraduate, three art education students, a student from the sculpture
department, one from social work, and three students from humanities and sciences, developed and taught a
community arts program, for ten children, age between 8 and 10. Concept and definitions used by the author

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were Facione‟s, Paul‟s, Ennis‟s CT definitions and frameworks. The program aimed to enhance the critical
thinking skills of ten urban elementary children by engaging them in enquiry-based art lessons. The CT skill
assessment was Test of Critical Thinking (Bracken et al., 2003). the results showed a pre-posttest significant
difference (p= .020) concerning CT skills level of the children enrolled in the class. The students were trained
to design and teach an enquiry-based program and after their training the children were involved in art
classes. A critique to this paper is that the students were not tested for their CT level, and we can only
speculate that it should be sufficiently higher in order to teach using enquiry-based teaching methods.
Ulger (2018) conducted an experiment with art students, testing a problem-based learning (PBL) program for
the development of creative thinking and critical thinking dispositions. PBL had a significant effect on creative
thinking, but critical thinking disposition had lower levels of improvement. One possible explanation, says the
author, is that in this study, open structures were used for learning activities as a nonroutine problem-solving
process to develop creative thinking (Ulger, 2018, pg. 1). So, the program was not calibrated for CT
dispositions development. One straightforward answer why we cannot find CT into Arts is in the essay wrote
by Laurie Fendrich (2016), How Critical Thinking Sabotages Painting (not part of the selected papers). The
author calls CT “a disaster when used to teach painting, whether to college art majors who want to become
painters, to students who want to go into neighbouring fields like graphic design or photography, or to biology
students who decide to give painting a try” (Fendrich, 2016, p. 1). Hence, Art and CT might not be best
friends, as painter Wayne Thiebaud (in Fendrich 2016, p. 2) explains: “To call everything art is an
obfuscation for the students and fails to clarify what we‟re trying to get at as painters. Painting is concrete,
but art is abstract. I don‟t think we know what art is. But we know a lot about painting.”
Painting can help health sciences students to improve their critical thinking skills linked to the fact creative
artists use critical thinking when they paint (Velde 2008). The assumption is that all students, no matter of
their subject, can improve their CT skills by taking art lessons in a certain manner (analytical discussion, self-
reflection). The „method‟ is very unusual, Ethnography. The author says that the students had a text about
Ethnography and a text using ethnographical method. The students supposed to read them critically
following a list of questions. Then, together with the professor, draw of what their inner self looks like as they
reflect on the chapter content. Another technique of enhancing CT was by writing a haiku. So, through
poetry. However, Velde doesn‟t assess students „CT skills, the article being a good practice example. She
takes Facione‟s framework into consideration as CT conceptualization.
An approximation of CT is critical dialog or analytical thinking. In a study that involves Arts and critical
dialogue Knight argues that the Arts „can complement verbal dialogue through their ability to transcend
verbal language barriers, allow previously silenced narratives to be articulated and encourage people to think
critically about themselves, humanity and the world‟ (Knight 2014, 77).
Shifting just a little the discussion and adding performing arts together with humanities and HE, we can quote
S.V. Chappell and D. Chappell (2016) that describe how a counter-narrative arts-based inquiry projects build
critical thought and social inclusion. They prove that „public performance installations created by graduate
students in elementary and bilingual education on needs-based and dignity-based rights of bilingual families
at schools‟ and „visual and performance art pieces on historical colonial practices in world history, created by
undergraduate theatre students‟ are good for developing critical thought (which we can consider equivalent
to CT).About music, Lenore Pogonowski (1989) thinks that dialogues that involve students in analysis can
help them become better listeners and musicians. In an exploratory study by Kilic, Yazici, and Topalak the
critical thinking dispositions of music teacher candidates using variables such as age, gender, secondary
school type, daily TV viewing frequency, parental attitudes, and frequency of book and newspaper reading.
The researchers used the California Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory (CCTDI-T) Facione (1992) to
determine the study group's critical thinking disposition. The only information we obtain from this paper is
that „the critical thinking disposition of the study group varied considerably based on book and newspaper
reading frequency‟ (Kilic, Yazici, and Topalak 2017, 185). Plus, female students‟ self-efficacy scores were
significantly higher than those of their male colleagues.
All the artistic domains have the part called „critics‟. In the Arts, there is not a preoccupation about CT as we
defined it in the first part of the article and it is called „critical analysis‟ (Subramaniam, Hanafi and Putih 2016)
or „critical inquiry‟ (Tucker 2007), or „art appreciation‟ (Hurwitz 1994). During this research, I could not identify
any intervention regarding CT and Art Critics.
5.2 Critical Thinking and Humanities
The domain called the Humanities is vast. As I have said, searching for CT and Humanities had no fruitful
result. For example, a lot of literature is referring to „medical or health humanities‟ (Kooken and Kerr 2018,

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McCaffrey 2016, Macneill 2017, Liao and Wang 2016). The reason of the recent development of this domain
is „to provide more humanizing medical care‟ (Liao and Wang 2016). I shall not develop further discussion
about this domain, although very interesting, because it involves Biomedical Sciences, which is not our topic.
Three other papers (Eldridge 2016, Silvers 2001 or Tomlison 1998) contained the searched terms, but the
content had nothing to do with the searched topic, meaning, the relationship between Humanities and CT.
However, many of the humanistic approaches claim to enhance critical thinking skills, like the quasi-
experimental study of Liao and Wang (2016) which demonstrated that the application of heterogeneous
cluster grouping to reflective writing for medical humanities literature study enhances students‟ empathy,
critical thinking, and reflective writing.
Humanities include Literature, Linguistics, Communication, Digital or online communication, and some
correlates – e.g. digital storytelling. In the following, I will discuss the relationship of this domains with CT.
Humanities and critical thinking are called together to make a better HE curriculum (Rubin 2013).
Although the syntagma „critical thinking‟ appears in the same paper with Literature, we see that there is little
connection and little understanding of the CT in the terms we put it in the description of the concept. For
example, in an article (Lyubomirov, 2017) where is considered the poet as a critic and the problem of the
place of literary criticism, history and theory in literary studies, it is developed the thesis that we should follow
the principle „from author to author‟, so we can differentiate thematic-problematic circle: biography - critics
arguments of the author - literary text. And the author gives a meaning to the anthological and critical
thinking of Pencho Slaveykov in 'On the Isle of the Blessed' and in the essay of Dimcho Debelyanov „About
an old song‟ (at least he claims to give a meaning to critical thinking). But not even close to the definition to
which we refer when we speak about CT.
We cannot say definitively if Literature is enhancing CT, but we can say that the use of literary texts may not
only be useful in developing reading skills but also in encouraging learners to become more critical (Gilroy
and Parkinson, 1997). For example, in analyzing characters, students become more critical not only in the
way they perceive the characters in the texts they read but also, more critical of themselves at the same
time. The process of negotiation of meaning in which students learn to view and understand others‟
perspectives may assist them to become critical thinkers (Paul, 1998; Ruggerio, 2001).
In his article, Prinsloo (2018) aimed to determine how four disciplinary groups of students responded to
literature when no apparent pedagogic purpose was explicitly assigned to short stories as supplementary
reading. The literature is viewed as catalyst for homogenous and heterogeneous patterns of disciplinary
thinking. The study is exploratory, with a volume of 55 students from arts, music, engineering and science.
The results have implications for the transferability of CT skills and for the distinction among different
patterns of thinking related to the disciplines. The students from all disciplines demonstrated homogenous
thinking patterns when positive critical evaluations were made. Cross-disciplinary homogenous thinking
paring occurred when disciplines conducted negative critical evaluations (Prinsloo, 2018, pp. 147-159). It
means that hard pure and applied and soft pure disciplines seem to make a positive evaluation based on
similar thinking patterns (Prinsloo 2018, 155). The consequence is that the medieval distinctions between
mechanical and liberal arts and our contemporary typology of hard and soft disciplines are challenged by the
patterns of thinking that were identified in this study. Hence, the comparison between art and music, on one
hand, and science and engineering students, on the other hand, through literature, revealed similar critical
thinking patterns between them.
In an experimental study that was carried out at International Islamic University in Malaysia, the experimental
group was exposed to text analysis using a concordancer, while the control group analyzed the text manually
(the play Othello). The Cornell Critical Thinking Test was used as assessment instrument. The assumption
was that the background, characters and their motives are among those that invite critical inquiry and
interpretation (Daud and Husin 2004, p. 477).
Digital storytelling is a new field of Literature, and we owe the birth of this domain to the omnipresence of
information technology. A very good study (Yang and Wu 2012) is demonstrating the relationship with CT,
shows through and experimental design that the critical thinking is better if it benefits from a digital
storytelling course, in comparison to a lecture-type course, with textbooks and power-point presentations.
History is another field in the Humanities and I found an experimental paper „Explicitly teaching critical
thinking skills in a History course‟ (McLaughlin and McGill 2017) where a pre- posttest research was
conducted. The authors investigated the effects of a history course on epistemically unwarranted beliefs in
two class sections. Beliefs declined for history students compared to a control class and the effect was
strongest for the honors section. The study claims to prove that humanistic education is beneficial for CT

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development.
The last, but not least of Humanities domains is Philosophy. And Philosophy is critical thinking. Most of CT
theoretical papers or books are written by philosophers and we have seen in the conceptual part of this
paper why this is justifiable. Philosophy is the origin of CT and from there it has its identity. But we don‟t have
empirical researches that puts together CT and Philosophy, except one paper „Does College Teach Critical
Thinking? A Meta-Analysis‟ (2016) where Christopher Huber and Nathan R. Kuncel conclude that there is no
difference among majors regarding CT skill after college, including Philosophy. But in an unpublished master
dissertation by Ortiz (2007) the Philosophy students have the biggest gain in CT skills after college, but the
sample size is small (6). And I want to finish giving a quote from Ortiz‟s paper:
There are also some indications in the findings of the thesis that both specifically what is taught (Logic, for
instance, as compared with philosophy subjects less directly concerned with reasoning skills in themselves)
and how it is taught (Keller Plan or LAMP) are the crucial considerations. This should not seem at all
surprising, of course. Its implications, however, are that claims for efficacy in teaching CTS should be
confined to very specific subject content and teaching methods, not to broad disciplines or, indeed,
disciplines as such, independent of the approach to teaching them. (Ortiz, 2007, pp. 90-91)
Regarding Culture, the search always added „studies‟ when returning the results. CT is linked to Cultural
Studies and we can mention the paper of Miu-Chi Lun, Fischer and Ward (2010). It starts from the idea that
cultural differences affect critical thinking performance. The study compares between Asian and Western
enrolled in New Zealand universities. The results showed that New Zealand European students performed
better on two objective measures of critical thinking skills than Asian students. English proficiency, but not
dialectical thinking style, could at least partially if not fully explain these differences. The results also
indicated that Asian students tended to rely more on dialectical thinking to solve critical thinking problems
than their Western colleagues. In a follow-up data analysis, authors showed that students' critical thinking
predicted their academic performance, after controlling for the effects of English proficiency and general
intellectual ability, but the relationship does not vary as a function of students' cultural backgrounds or
cultural adoption.
These results of the above-mentioned study contribute to the understanding of the influence of culture on
critical thinking in international education contexts.
Exploring the same pathway, other paper (Chiu 2009) tries to enhance Asians students CT skills, about
which it has been revealed that have a negative disposition towards critical thinking compared with
Australian university students (Tiwari, Avery and Lai 2003).
6 LIMITATIONS
The main research limitation is the theoretical and terminological barrier between CT experts and academics
from another fields. The later do not have the same preoccupation for the definition and conceptualization of
CT and often we can find elements of critical thinking in digital storytelling or we can find equivalency
between CT and analytical thinking or critical dialogue.
If I would have kept putting in the search engine keywords like “critical thinking”, “Humanities”, “the Arts”, this
paper could not exist, because no relevant papers emerge.
In order to have a review of how critical thinking is viewed in Humanities, for example, the researcher should
be a specialist in this domain so he/she be knowledgeable in what to look for (which terms) to find the CT
and the Humanities related.
Maybe it is a good idea to have a paper on Arts, another in Humanities, other in Culture, because these
domains are so vast and diverse, that one paper cannot comprise all the sub-domains in which CT
contributes to or it benefits from them. More research is needed to show that when it comes to link CT, Arts,
Humanities and Culture the beneficiary is CT, and not vice-versa, as we can find in other domains.
Conclusions of what might be a literature review on Critical Thinking in Arts, Humanities and Culture
As observed from this article, the literature combining the four domains overwhelmingly asserts that
Humanities, Arts and somehow Cultural Studies have a good effect on the development of critical thinking
skills. So the research question was not confirmed. The presupposition was that CT has a good effect on
Arts, Humanities and Culture and we discovered that the experts argue that Arts and Humanities have a
positive impact on CT.
But we should not commit a fallacy and conclude that if Humanities have an impact on CT, the other

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domains don‟t have it. In his article “Critical thinking. Why is it so hard to teach?”, D. T. Willingham (2008)
explores why it is so hard to teach CT and explores how students acquire a specific type of critical thinking -
thinking scientifically: “critical thinking is not a set of skills that can be deployed at any time, in any context. It
is a type of thought that even 3-year-olds can engage in - and even trained scientists can fail in. And it is
very much dependent on domain knowledge and practice”. (Willingham, 2008, p. 22)
This can be very much our conclusion, namely that critical thinking is such a complex reality that it is not a
general domain called Critical Thinking which is impacting upon the specific domains, but the other way
around. In the Arts, the Humanities and Culture, the critical attitude which is specific to each of those
domains, builds up to a more general Critical Thinking skill.
7 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work is part of the „Critical Thinking Across the European Higher Education Curricula - CRITHINKEDU‟
project, with the reference number 2016-1-PT01-KA203022808, funded by the European
Commission/EACEA, through the ERASMUS + Programme.
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