Resumo

VALENZUELA, Jorge; NIETO, Ana María  e  MUNOZ, Carla. Motivation and Dispositions: Alternative Approaches to Explain the Performance of Critical Thinking Skills. REDIE [online]. 2014, vol.16, n.3, pp.16-32. ISSN 1607-4041.

Critical thinking depends on the mastery degrees of some skills and on the will to activate them when reasoning. Traditionally, this second aspect has been focused from a disposition approach (Facione, 1990). However, this perspective demonstrates problems in theoretical as in practical level to explain and to develop critical thinking. For this, it is proposed to approach the problem from the Motivation perspective (Eccles and Wigfield, 2002). In this context, our research deals with the evaluation of the convenience to choose one perspective or another to explain the performance of critical thinking, both theoretically and in its predictive capacity. Thus, along with theoretically analyze the strengths and weaknesses of both approaches and it was compared measures of dispositions (CCTDI), motivation (EMPC) and critical thinking (CCTST) in a sample of Spanish university students. The results show that the variability in critical thinking performance is better explained by the motivation than by dispositional approach. Finally, the theoretical and practical convenience of motivational approach in this matter is discussed.

Palavras-chave : Motivation; Dispositions; Critical thinking.