1. Introduction
Higher-order thinking skills (HOTS) are recognised as influential attributes for the quality of teaching and learning in higher education institutions around the world [
1]. HOTS are defined as a set of neurocognitive abilities required to involve goal-oriented thoughts, actions and emotions control [
2,
3,
4]. HOTS involve cognitive flexibility (thinking about something in various ways), working memory (taking information into account and, usually, manipulating it in some way) and inhibitory control (deliberately suppressing attention process to provide a response to something [
5,
6]). These skills not only allow students to learn more effectively but also help them to transfer the previously acquired knowledge to real situations in their daily lives. Thinking skills are essential for analysing situations or problems, making predictions, identifying patterns and representing conclusions. During the teaching and learning process, facilitating students’ HOTS helps them become more aware of their own thinking processes. Though self-awareness implies metacognitive and reflective thinking skills, it also encourages in students the development of other intellectual skills, making it possible for them to transfer the previously acquired scientific knowledge and apply it to new situations, favouring learning acquisition [
7,
8,
9].
Reflective thinking is a type of higher-order thinking (HOT) defined as a form of thinking aimed at determining the factors affecting the level of learning and the methods of solving problems by students [
10]. Reflective thinking presupposes a state of perplexity, hesitation or doubt, and mental difficulty. It is also an act of inquiry—a sophisticated search for the finding of solutions and decision making [
11]. Metacognition is a high-order thinking ability defined as the awareness and control of self-thinking. It is an executive control system of the human mind that oversees a person’s thoughts, knowledge and thinking actions [
12,
13]. It comprises two components concerning knowledge and regulation. The knowledge component is referred to as the cognitive self-knowledge process. Constituents of this component are the knowledge of oneself as a thinker, the characteristics of a given task and the strategies required to carry out a compelling performance. The regulatory component refers to the actual strategies that are applied to control cognitive processes. Constituents of this component are as follows: planning on how to approach a task, monitoring understanding, evaluating progress, performance [
14,
15].
The link between the above-mentioned cognitive skills—knowledge and regulatory components—is explained by Halper [
16]. This author states that when both critical and reflexive thinking is involved, students need to monitor their thinking process to verify if the goal is being achieved with precision—required functions for the activation of metacognitive skills. Consequently, metacognition is an undoubtedly central component in various forms of high-order thinking providing the understanding on how cognition works, and allows humans to develop intrapersonal skills related to understanding, argumentation, reasoning, self-reflection and other forms of higher-order thinking [
17].
The culture of every educational organisation has a profound effect on the development of the aforementioned skills, as well as on its trainers and trainees, since it shapes the identity of both entities and groups and determines the dispositions, decisions and responses of individuals to circumstantial challenges [
18,
19]. Consequently, through classroom environment cultures, practical strategies display themselves as meaningful for the connection with learning purposes. This factor leads to the importance of creating a culture of thought that helps students recognise the social and environmental contexts in which both individual and collective thought are fostered and valued, focuses the attention on and access to resources and routine practices and promotes the cognitive processes during the construction of learning [
20,
21]. Such enculturation of thought makes reference to shared social practices in classrooms, which create thought dispositions, mental inclinations and habits that benefit students’ productive thinking such as being reflective, seeking and evaluating reasons, exploring strategic solutions, constructing explanations, assuming risks and having dispositions to be metacognitive [
18,
22,
23,
24].
Considering the above-mentioned, Ritchhart [
22] proposes the promotion of eight cultural forces to promote thought among those who learn and are present in any educational context. The cultural forces as the foundations on which the acquisition and development of students’ critical and reflective thinking dispositions and skills are promoted. The promotion of the eight cultural forces is also shaped by the expectations about thinking and learning, the time to think, the interactions and the supportive relationships for the fostering of thinking, the modelling of thinking dispositions, the created opportunities for thinking, the thinking on language, the thinking routines and structures and the environment—factors encouraging expectations.
Expectations constitute a set of firm beliefs about future results or theories of action that influence humans’ efforts concerning the achievement of established objectives and desired results [
21]. In this particular case, expectations correspond to given demands from teachers towards students. Among the expectations that influence the required results are the orientation to the students in learning, the teaching for the understanding (instead of for mere rote knowledge), the promotion of deep learning, the promotion of the autonomy and independence of students upon the construction of learning and the promotion of thinking skills and cognitive flexibility [
25]. In consequence, the language of thought refers to the language used by teachers. Apropos of the vocabulary of thought and the reflexive process stimulations, the language of thought does also refer to its impact on students [
23].
The aforementioned lexical-reflexive processes encompass different terms of action that also describe the states and mental processes of each subject (analyse, justify, reason). In the same way, lexical-reflexive processes describe products, such as the formulation of hypotheses, questions or statements, that manifest epistemic attitudes that reflect, in turn, the position of the person towards an idea (I consider, I conclude, etc.) [
25]. In this sense, language takes on transcendent importance in providing feedback to people. The reason is that it helps to make teaching and learning visible entities in the classroom. Likewise, language helps to recognise the dispositions of thought and the power of the students during the process of feedback of learning [
26]. For the stimulation of lexical-reflexive processes, time is a relevant element, as a cultural force that constitutes a set of measurable periods to manage learning strategies. The sequence of events, discussions and reflections on the actions allow the scaffolding and the creation of a conductive thread through articulated learning opportunities to create uniformity. When students endure time to think, opportunities are encouraged at the same time for them to deepen their responses, to seek considerable evidence of their reasoning and to build deeper learning [
26].
Modelling is a necessary condition for a reflective practice, where conscious imitation allows the student to acquire the skills necessary to learn. By considering the modelling procedure and reflecting on it, students can acquire a conceptual understanding grounded in practice [
27]. Likewise, modelling offers subjects the opportunity to accept different perspectives, as well as new ways of acting and thinking. Modelling thinking, learning and independence skills require identifying the different models of thinking. It also requires reflection on the actions of such models, characteristics, attitudes and behaviours, to incorporate them routinely in the development of tasks [
26]. Creating opportunities implies clarifying the expected learning, applying the criteria of the novel application, meaningful research, efficient communication and the perceived value of the task. The purpose is to favour collaborative, autonomous and self-regulated learning [
22]. Posing a variety of instructional formats or potentially meaningful and constructive tasks helps to activate the different cognitive processes, in addition to deepening the reflection and deep learning of the students.
The use of structures and routines to anchor and support the thinking and deep learning of students consists in creating strategies that demand a series of cognitive behaviours, orient the thinking of the learners, structure group or individual discussions and operate with curricular content. Such facilitation invites teachers and students to observe, record, interpret and share ideas, thoughts and understanding of the contents and discussions addressed. Similarly, such routines become behavioural patterns to deepen understanding, reasoning and reflection on self-learning [
28]. Considering that student learning in higher education occurs in an environment of academic learning, where language, space organisation, the transmission of values and key information converge, the teacher must know the specific strategies to support and motivate students. Instructors must also know how to provide learners with valid learning resources that arouse their interest and curiosity, generate an excellent emotional climate and become the scaffolding of learning [
11].
In addition to being an individual process, interaction as a cultural force is supported by the theories considering that the development of critical and reflexive thinking is mediated by social discourse [
27]. From the previous reflection emanates the importance of teachers generating teaching situations that, in turn, cause new opportunities for inquiries. The formulation of generative questions soaking through higher-level thinking skills might provide interpretations and connections between previous knowledge and new knowledge in a shared and distributed way among students and teachers. From all the referenced shapes, students’ ways of thinking and learning encourage the adoption of positive values and habits of mind. These shapes do also encourage learners to be aware of and sensitive to the contexts in which they are located, as well as to broaden their perspective and to develop flexible metacognitive thinking skills.
Current research findings reveal this is not the case, and that some students still leave college having acquired rather limited cognitive skills to meet the challenges of the global community nowadays [
29,
30,
31].
Therefore, due to the relevance of the inculturation of thinking for the teaching staff and the implications for the improvement of their educational action based on university training programmes, the paper provides evidence concerning a validation study of the Eight-Cultural-Forces Scale [
22] in a sample of Spanish university students of education.
4. Discussion and Conclusions
The implemented scale reveals itself as a highly reliable instrument, a fact clearly related to the data in previous studies [
4,
22]. Scientific literature [
35] suggests that in initial or exploratory studies, reliability values of up to 0.6 can be valid as well. In the same line of thought, Lowental [
36] points out that in scales with few items encompassing a maximum of 10, a reliability of 0.4 can also be acceptable. Considering these last words, there is only one of the implemented scales in this research with a reliability value close to 0.6, the Language dimension. This fact could be due to several aspects, but the one believed is that there is a possibility that items 2 and 3 were poorly defined. Similarly, item sensitivity to the sense of scale may be due to the fact that, in the university context, feedback is a barely common practice [
37]. For example, the use of conditionals can be interpreted differently by pupils in those university contexts where a teaching culture oriented towards the development of reflective thinking is not deliberately disclosed [
38]. In any case, this shows that in future applications of the questionnaire, the stability or variation of this indicator should be studied [
33].
The evidence of validity reveals that the underlying relational structure of the questionnaire (RMSEA = 0.037; CFI = 0.943) is integrated by eight dimensions in coherence with the established theoretical model [
24]. Thus, the number of items and their accuracy to measure the dimension account for their adequate stability [
39]. The interaction of item commonalities and sample size are high, resulting in latent dimensions being very well represented [
40]. The results of the AFC show that the conceptual reference is well defined. These results are highly comparable to previous studies [
4,
22]. In the same way, correlations between dimensions that present an adequate behaviour are displayed, leading to the observation that all the latent variables maintain a statistically significant correlation. This observable pattern is linked to the data obtained in a five-year longitudinal study in learning communities in Melbourne, where researchers stated that an exploration of these eight cultural forces provides the conceptual and practical backbone to focus the exploration of thinking for the active construction of student learning and to create a classroom culture [
24].
In this validation study, it is possible to establish that the empirical criterion is ideal for the process of validation of the scale through a sample of university students. In consequence, three things can be concluded:
- (1)
The instrument displays a high value to discriminate the impact of teacher training oriented to the promotion of reflexive learning. Such criterion represents the degree of adjustment for how the empirical model provides good evidence to the objectives of this study, which is mixed up with the theoretical criterion found in the “why” of the interrelation established a priori in an endorsement to be taken into account [
40]. Hence, this questionnaire provides eight dimensions that make it possible to identify students’ perspectives of the enculturation of thought in their initial teacher training (appointment). Nevertheless, this fact should be carefully reviewed in future studies for better adjustment of items and the saturation in each of the dimensions, but especially in those linked to the latent dimension referred to as Language [
22].
- (2)
The instrument provides valid information to make teachers aware of whether or not they are addressing their students’ reflexive learning. The questionnaire also provides an assessment of each of the cultural forces fostering, at the same time, the development of thinking skills, expectations, language, time to think, modelling, opportunities to think, thinking routines, interactions and the environment. These dimensions represent worthy instruments for professors to get accurate feedback on how students perceive that the mediation of the learning process is favoured with the emphasis on the promotion of thought. The dimensions also provide lecturers information on how to facilitate the reflection of the teaching action, to optimise the educational quality since, as other research has shown, teachers need evidence that makes them aware of the importance of promoting routines and situations linked to reflective thinking [
41,
42,
43].
- (3)
The instrument complements the research efforts to improve the formative processes of university students around reflective learning. Consequently, the obtained results might amplify the intention along with other questionnaires like, for example, the Student Evaluation of Educational Quality scale [
44]. Although the Student Evaluation of Educational Quality scale items are dissimilar from the ones implemented in our research, they evaluate eight similar dimensions: learning, enthusiasm, organisation, interaction with the group, updated presentation of the subject, interaction of the teacher with individual students, evaluation and feedback. Though they are different items [
45], they have also been used in a psychometric questionnaire for the assessment of (German) university students.
To sum up, the use of this type of questionnaire is essential to strengthen reflective thinking at university. It contributes to the implementation of successful teaching and learning models [
22,
24,
33,
46,
47,
48,
49], that is, models that simultaneously facilitate the learning of conceptual domains and the development of cognitive skills such as thinking, language, communication, perception, comprehension and reasoning. Such models are also expected to promote the use of narrative methodologies [
42] or the reflective narrative learning through writing [
50,
51] that expose students to real-life situations, allowing them to approach real problems, to participate in debates and to propose solutions to the given problems. In that matter, universities are responsible for helping future professionals to acquire the knowledge and to develop cognitive/mental skills and habits ensuring trainees to be able to reflect on their own beliefs and decisions. The reason is that trainees need to be aware and critical of their own assumptions, able to engage openly with different cultural forms and historical moments and able to develop problem-solving skills—all in a sustained paradigm of transformational, critical and reflective lifelong learning. Such expectations are established by potential employers expecting employees to own these skills [
43].
The promotion of reflective thinking through the didactical implementation of cultural forces in the training of education degree students has little development from quantitative approaches [
4,
22]. Generally, the vast number of investigations approaching the topic qualitatively [
20,
38,
42] have provided evidence on the benefits of training teachers and leading classroom learning towards reflexive learning about education fostering the professional development of the students. Fostering is barely promoted in quantitative guidance, where research is starting to experience more significant growth, although these studies are still moderate on the impact of reflexive learning of cultural forces [
4,
22,
33].