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Psychological misconceptions present problems for psychology students as well as for laypersons, experts, and others who need to think critically about psychological information. Recent progress in measuring psychological misconceptions has led to fresh understandings of how people with better critical thinking skills and dispositions are less prone to misconceptions and how people who adopt a more intuitive approach to thinking are more prone to them, as predicted by dual process models of cognition. Recent studies also suggest that people who endorse more misconceptions show more impaired metacognition by failing to accurately monitor what they know. These new findings help to explain why refutational approaches, which explicitly activate misconceptions and debunk them with contrary evidence, often reduce misconception endorsement. Nevertheless, they may not readily explain why some efforts to eliminate misconceptions backfire or are otherwise ineffective, highlighting the need for more research on misconception content and individual differences in cognition, personality, and attitudes that predict misconception endorsement.

Assessment of student learning outcomes can be a powerful tool for improvement of instruction when a scientific approach is taken; unfortunately, many educators do not take full advantage of this approach. This article examines benefits of taking a scientific approach to critical thinking assessment and proposes guidelines for planning, conducting, and using assessment research. Specifically, we discuss study design options and strategies for improving the quality of assessment data and the use of such data to improve critical thinking instruction in programs. Examples of practices from three programs that have conducted considerable critical thinking assessment illustrate use of the guidelines. Using scientific assessment to develop evidence-based educational practices shows great promise in contributing to the scholarship of teaching critical thinking.

Critical thinking is a valued educational outcome; however, little is known about whether psychology courses, especially ones such as research methods courses that might be expected to promote critical thinking skills, actually improve them. We compared the acquisition of critical thinking skills for analyzing psychological arguments in 3 groups of research methods students, 1 getting critical thinking skills infused directly into their course and 2 other groups getting no explicit critical thinking skills instruction. We found that the group receiving explicit critical thinking skills instruction showed significantly greater gains in their argument analysis skills than the groups receiving no explicit critical thinking instruction. These results support the effectiveness of explicitly teaching critical thinking skills infused directly into regular course instruction.