Critical Thinking for Successful Jobs

THINK4JOBS brings together a multidisciplinary team with several research centers involved with Critical Thinking (CT) education within the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) and the Labor Market, across five European countries, namely Germany, Greece, Lithuania, Portugal and Romania. In particular, the project proposes the development of CT blended curricula in order to frame apprenticeships - designed to give the HE students the opportunity to train critical thinking skills - in a systematic way, transferring and consolidating them from an academic environment to a professional/employment context. 

The project aims to strengthen UBC for the effective promotion, development, support and assessment of students’ CT through their transition into a professional context using apprenticeships as a privileged interface in order to “bridge the gap” between their skills and those needed by the labour market.

To meet the aim of the project, specific objectives were set:

1. To develop the THINK4JOBS Toolkit identifying existing gaps in the development and implementation of CT instruction in HE and the workplace as well as providing 10 work-based-learning scenarios (for each one of the specific disciplines addressed by the consortium, namely Veterinary Medicine, Teacher Education, Business and Economics, and Business Informatics.) with exploitation recommendations to HE and labour market.

2. To develop a training curriculum for HE instructors and labour market tutors on how to promote, develop, support and assess students’ CT in apprenticeships curricula as well as on how to develop blended curricula using Moodle. 

3. To train HE instructors (i.e., 15) and labour market tutors (i.e., 15) with the training curriculum.  

4. To develop 15 CT blended apprenticeships curricula through UBC for the disciplines addressed by the consortium.

5. To implement and evaluate the 15 THINK4JOBS CT blended apprenticeships curricula in the various disciplines affecting around 150 students.

6. To develop a set of guidelines, namely a protocol of how CT should be transferred in blended apprenticeships curricula.

7. To disseminate the results in the academic community through the publication of one special issue reporting how CT can be transferred from the academic studies to the labour market and how the labour market can contribute to HE