Fostering Critical and Creative Thinking through the Cooperative Learning Jigsaw and Group Investigation

The effects of cooperative learning on the promotion of critical thinking skills in college students are well documented, but not in conjunction with critical thinking dispositions. Since there are no studies on this topic in the Portuguese context, our aim is to verify whether cooperative learning using the Jigsaw and Group Investigation methods promote critical and creative thinking skills and dispositions in higher education. It was employed a quasi-experimental design with a pretest and posttest using the Critical and Creative Thinking Test (CCT) and the Critical Thinking Dispositions Scale (CTDS) with equivalent groups and a control group. The participants were 106 undergraduate students attending three different classes of the 3rd year of a university in northern Portugal. One class was Pre-service teaching and the others were Psychology undergraduates. The results demonstrate that only the intervention groups had significantly higher scores in the CCT posttest than in the pretest. Regarding dispositions, only the students having experienced the Jigsaw method improved. Implications and pedagogical suggestions are presented.