Evaluation of the effectiveness of the ARDESOS-DIAPROVE critical thinking training programme

The changes of the 21st century arising from globalisation and technology have led to a transformation both in the professional and the personal environment. Today's highly complex world demands a more in-depth way of thinking in order to adapt to these changes. In this paper, a training system has been proposed to address these issues. In recent years, our team has progressively developed a programme for teaching critical thinking to university students, obtaining very positive results in the improvement of these skills. Our experience over the years has enabled us to modify and improve the ARDESOS programme. These modifications include the addition of a new methodology called DIAPROVE. The new approach is based on primarily working on the diagnostic, prognostic, and verification procedures. Our general objective in this study was to improve critical thinking skills using the latest version of our training programme. We have implemented this programme to see if it produced the desired changes in terms of the magnitude of effect and generalisation of skills. The effectiveness of previous versions had already been demonstrated in different studies, and our aim in this study was to show whether this latest version of the programme (DIAPROVE) substantially improved the effectiveness of the teaching of transversal thinking skills. The PENCRISAL test was the tool used to evaluate the level of improvement. To verify our hypotheses, we used a quasi-experimental design involving a control and an experimental group. Pre/post intervention measures were taken in order to determine the changes in learning. The results show that the experimental group significantly improved its performance in critical thinking for the control group, both globally and in each of the dimensions; in addition, a significant interaction effect was obtained, which further supports our starting hypothesis.