A Systematic Literature Review of Research Trends on Critical Thinking Skills

Human resources that can face the challenges of increasingly rapid and dynamic development must have high intellectual skills. High intellectual skills are characterized by critical thinking skills, creativity competitiveness, and the ability to communicate ideas and solve any problems. Intellectual skills, especially critical thinking skills, are the demands of human resources in the 21 st century. In recent years, the development of critical thinking skills-based research has been rapid. Critical thinking skills research has produced many theoretical and empirical findings. Many trends and issues have emerged, proving the complexity and dynamics of critical thinking skills research. This study aims to provide an overview of the latest research on critical thinking skills. The development of recent research on critical thinking skills in recent years can be illustrated through a bibliometric approach. The bibliometric approach was applied to uncover the most common keywords and terms and their interactions through compound word analysis. The Scopus database was selected for the period 2011 to 2021; 2,855 documents were obtained, and then the publications each year, the most researched topics, and the development of interest in these topics were identified. The research results show that from 2011 to 2020, there was a significant increase in research on critical thinking skills, while there was a decline from 2020 to 2021. Research topics that are closely related to critical thinking skills are higher-order thinking skills. The topic of critical thinking has a close relationship with education, curriculum, and educational measurement. Research on critical thinking skills with innovative learning models, such as inquiry learning and discovery learning models, has not been widely studied. Even though a lot of research on critical thinking skills has been carried out, there is still a need to develop research on critical thinking skills in various frameworks.