Samenvatting

Critical Thinking is a important indicator for achievement in education. It can benefit students to handle complex problems and to make better decisions. Adequate critical thinking skills help record and process information, making students more able to identify useful information and being less distracted by irrelevant information. However, students experience difficulties in the area of critical thinking. Academic emotions also indicate academic achievement. Positive emotions such as enjoyment, hope, and pride predicted high achievement, and negative emotions predicted low achievement. Critical thinking and academic emotions can mediate each other. Both in a positive and a negative way. This research was done to determine what the correlation between critical thinking and academic emotions is among second year psychology students of a Dutch University of Applied Sciences and a Russian University.
To answer the research questions, 54 second year applied psychology students have filled in the Critical Thinking Toolkit and the Learning-related section of the Achievement Emotions Questionnaire, together with sixteen open-ended question. The Spearman’s rank correlation was used to examine the correlation between critical thinking and academic emotions.
The research results show that there is a correlation between positive academic emotions and critical thinking among second year psychology students. No correlation has been found between negative academic emotions and critical thinking among second year psychology students.
The purpose of this research was to explore how critical thinking and academic emotions can be used in education. CT should be more implemented in education through interaction between theoretical and practical knowledge. To enable positive emotions, interventions should be used to improve recognition of the importance of critical thinking and confidence in critical thinking. Interventions aimed at misconceptions and avoidance of CT should be used especially when negative emotions want to be inhibited. Interventions aimed to facilitate positive emotions could create cognitive openings, creating more self-confidence, self-effectiveness and appreciation for CT in itself.
Recommended for a further research is to explore the correlation between critical thinking and academic emotions more. Through collecting more data in upcoming academic years and collecting data from different cultures.