Chinese Graduate Student Understandings and Struggles with Critical Thinking: A Narrative-Case Study

Qualitative research offers the potential to inform an ongoing issue concerning why international students struggle with critical thinking. This article approaches the issue by examining how international graduate students understand critical thinking as well as the challenges they have faced with critical thinking. The study used a narrative-case study framework to collect data from 4 Chinese international graduate students at a large mid-Western research university in the United States. The results showed that the participants had diverse conceptions of critical thinking and that they tended to focus on dispositions related to critical thinking rather than skills. These results suggest that participants’ struggles may be related to diverse conceptualizations of critical thinking as well as an overemphasis on dispositions. Furthermore, educational differences between the U.S. and China were highlighted in the interviews with the participants, which supports other findings in the literature.