The relationship between critical thinking and analytic versus holistic thinking

Cultivating students’ critical thinking ability has been considered as an essential aspect in university education. Critical thinking is concerned with the ability to process of available information and reach conclusion based on that process. The development of students’ critical thinking ability can be a challenge for classrooms with students of culturally diverse background, because people from different cultures may prefer different approaches to receive and process information. For example, the proposition of analytic versus holistic thinking (Nisbett et al., 2001) showed that there were differences between East Asian and Westerners in the ways that they process contradictory information, with East Asians being more tolerant to contradiction than Westerners. Such differences could be a reason for previously observed difference in critical thinking between these two groups of students as indicated in the international education literature. In this presentation, previous crosscultural research on critical thinking will be reviewed, and the potential of understanding critical thinking using the analytic versus holistic thinking framework will be examined. To investigate the possible relationship between critical thinking and analytic versus holistic thinking, the critical thinking performance and thinking preferences of New Zealand European students and Chinese international students were assessed, and the results and implications of this study will also be discussed.