Evaluating Moroccan University Open and Restricted-Access Institutions Students’ Critical Thinking Skills

Abstract

In tandem with developing students' skills in various fields, university aims to contribute to shaping active citizens possessing transferable power skills useful in both their personal and professional lives. Preparing young people for their future professional lives entails catering to a job market increasingly prioritizing highly sought-after power skills, beyond the mere knowledge and skills necessary for the job. Hence, power skills instruction has been incorporated into tertiary education curricula. Yet, research exploring to what extent higher education institutions in Morocco have been successful in developing these skills in students remains scarce. This study aims to contribute to filling this void through a comparative study of critical thinking skills among students in the final semester of a bachelor’s degree program at an open-access faculty and a restricted-access school within a public university. An argument evaluation through a reasoning fallacy identification test was administered to semester six students at both the Department of English Studies at the Faculty of Languages, Letters, and Arts (FLLA) and the Higher School for Education and Training (HSET) at Ibn Tofail University. The students’ scores were analyzed and compared. The results indicate that there were no significant differences between the scores of the two institutions’ students and that the overall low scores reflect a critical thinking deficiency at the end of a three-year higher education academic journey. The implications of this study’s findings are that more emphasis should be put on critical thinking skills instruction and that better means of enhancing these skills should be developed and implemented in higher education institutions in Morocco.