Creativity is an indispensable competence for the future of higher education students. Creative thinking skills play an important role in modern society. Creativity is acknowledged as a crucial aspect of business, research and development or arts. This study presents the assessment results of an intervention using cooperative learning and the conventional teaching method in order to promote creative thinking in higher education. The design used was quasi-experimental pretest and posttest intervention using the Creative Intelligence test (CREA), with experimental and control groups of higher education students of the Communication and Multimedia course in a Linear Algebra class. The participants were 50 students from a Portuguese public university. Results showed that students who participated in the intervention scored significantly higher in the creativity test at the end of the intervention and indicated that creative thinking, and divergent thinking abilities in particular, can be enhanced through the kind of intervention that was proposed in the study.

As there is no critical and creative thinking test built from scratch to be used in Portugal, the focus of this work is the Critical and Creative Thinking Test for Portuguese young adults. We present the exploratory study of validation of this test, applied to 250 university students, aged from 17 to 37, attending a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) or a Human and Social Sciences degree (HSS). From the Exploratory Factor Analysis emerged three factors (creation, argumentation and analysis), which illustrate essential components of critical thinking. The Critical and Creative Thinking Test revealed good psychometric characteristics of constructs validity and reliability (Cronbach's alpha equal to 0.68) and interrater reliability (Cohen's kappa between 0.76 and 0.93 for each dimension). Students of a Master's degree were found to have scored significantly higher on the Critical and Creative Thinking Test than students of a Bachelor's degree, and the scores for STEM students were higher than the scores of HSS students. No statistically significant differences were found in the mean scores of the Critical and Creative Thinking Test according to gender.

Considering the results of research on the benefits and difficulties of peer review, this paper describes how teaching faculty, interested in endorsing the acquisition of communication and critical thinking (CT) skills among engineering students, has been implementing a learning methodology throughout online peer review activities. While introducing a new methodology, it is important to weight the advantages found and the conditions that might have restrained the activity outcomes, thereby modulating its overall efficiency. Our results show that several factors are decisive for the success of the methodology: the use of specific and detailed orientation guidelines for CT skills, the students' training on how to deliver a meaningful feedback, the opportunity to counter-argument, the selection of good assignments' examples, and the constant teacher's monitoring of the activity. Results also tackle other aspects of the methodology such as the thinking skills evaluation tools (grades and tests) that most suit our reality. An improved methodology is proposed taking in account the encountered limitations, thus offering the possibility to other interested institutions to use/test and/or improve it.

Even though Critical Thinking (CT) is an important goal for higher education institutions and labour market professionals, studies dealing with employers' perceptions on CT meaning and envisioning in the workplace are scarce. Intended to tackle this gap, the current study provides an overview of the need for and practical application of CT in the workplace from the employers' views. Adopting a qualitative research methodology, five focus group interviews were carried out, enrolling 28 representatives of different Portuguese Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO), public and private companies, in four different professional fields: Biomedicine, STEM (Sciences, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics), Social Sciences, and Humanities. Using Facione's framework for data analysis, results suggest that CT is broadly recognized by employers as a set of interdependent skills and dispositions that are needed in new graduates, presenting slight differences in their practical application across professional fields. This paper also discusses and outlines implications to support universities in the promotion of students' CT skills and dispositions.

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