Critical Thinking and Managerial Decision Making

This article explores the importance of critical thinking in decision making and its impact on real-life outcomes. It discusses how critical thinking can enhance academic performance and prepare students for their future careers. The study focuses on the relationship between critical thinking and decision-making competence in college students, with a particular emphasis on the fields of humanities and engineering. The findings highlight the advantages of critical thinking in avoiding negative outcomes in daily life decisions.

Critical Thinking and Managerial Decision
Making
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Introduction
Critical thinking is determined to be a skill that enhances presentation and language skills. It is
considered as the logically disciplined method of enthusiastically and skilfully abstracting,
relating, analysing, creating, and assessing data. This information is collected from or produced
by observing, experiencing, reflecting, reasoning or communicating that acts as a guide to trust
and exploit. The use of critical thinking (CT), helps in understanding the information like how
the message works, what the message means, what the message says about the audience and the
messenger.
How the real-life outcomes are influenced by critical thinking was studied by many researchers
and the study selected for this assignment represents the advantages of critical thinking in
academic performance, helping students to manage, examine and analyze their performance. The
different connection of CT with higher education can be described as CT can prepare students to
be lifelong learners through displaying stronger insights of academic control with a positive
influence on their academic experience. The application of critical thinking to college students
can create a strong approach to learning and works as beneficial tools to begin a professional
career.
Critical Thinking Analysis
CT is the process of purposeful and self-regulating judgement that arises from a set of cognitive
skill sets. This type of thinking can enable students to do the tasks like recognize the rational
connections among thoughts, solve issues methodically, observe contradictions and shared
mistakes in intellectual, spot, construct as well as analyse arguments, provide the reflection on
the explanation of one's own views and standards. According to Franco & Almeida, (2015),
student present in any institution or school or university are from different backgrounds, and they
communicate about their different experiences and perceptive leading to thinking of students in
more complex ways. The study determines the significant effect of critical thinking on decision
making process while pursuing higher education, such as humanities and engineering, depending
upon the gender difference. In every day's life of subject and settings, the thinking rationally and
reasonably can make well-founded and particular independent decisions that are most likely to
be advantageous (Kitchin, 2017). Studies were validated based on the Halpern Critical Thinking

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Assessment (HCTA) because it had highlighted how the application of CT prevents negative
outcomes in daily life decisions.
The main aim of the research is to determine the relation between decision making outcomes
and decision-making competence experienced by people in the real world. The research
objectives are as follows:
 To culturally implement and translate the RWO to the Portuguese language
 Manage this investigational form to evaluate its consistency as well as to demonstrate it to
the college students To gather experiential data to provide some concerns based on the adverse results
The core research questions of the article are as follows:
 What is the importance of critical thinking for college students?
 What is the relationship between CT and real life?
 What is the impact of CT on real life?
 What are the advantages of critical thinking?
It is significant to address the above research questions as it will help in gathering relevant
information and studying real-life situations and real-world outcomes (RWO).
For this study, the RWO related to the Portuguese version has been used that consist of 40
dichotomous reports that demonstrates life events. The RWO was provided to a sample of
community to over 259 undergraduate’s students, out of which 166 were females under the age
group of 18 to 50 years (Hibbert & Cunliffe, 2015). This convenience sample contains juniors,
sophomores and first-year students who are pursuing an academic major in engineering and
humanities. The Portuguese version was used to recognize and correct potential inconsistencies.
A qualitative analysis of the RWO has been conducted with a group of 14 undergraduate's
students, to understand the process of think aloud. It is used to ensure that the objectives were
relevant, understandable and clear.
In order to use RWO the permission from the professional translator and two university teachers
have been obtained. Within the period of regular classes, the experimental version of Portuguese
was used. Based on the social translation, the original and Portuguese versions were standardized

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and compared. The study was presented by considering the privacy and voluntary participation
of the student’s. During the study, the instructions were read aloud and to complete the RWO,
the participants or the students spend near about 20 minutes (Beach & Lipshitz, 2017).
Based on the major findings, it can be seen that higher competence of decision making is
associated with better outcomes of decision making. As per the results, the skills related to
decision making was studied in separation for a better knowledge of the association among RWO
and decision making capability, other cognitive abilities and decision making capability and
among the different skills (Mahmoud-Jouini, Midler & Silberzahn, 2016). It has been found that
the participants with a higher score of Halpern Critical Thinking Assessment (HCTA) faced less
negative results in their everyday life in comparison with the participants with low HCTA score.
This results in a relationship between RWO and CT, stating the fact that it is easier for critical
thinkers to avoid negative outcomes in making decisions in daily life.
The findings of the study state that the variables are determined to be a distinguishing feature of
undergraduate students based on daily negative results as measured by RWO. As there is no
result for the statistical significance for gender differences and academic major, the direction of
variance among the participants is remarkable (Ku, Lee & Ellis, 2017). As per the findings, as
compared to the undergraduates from humanities, the engineering students scored higher on the
RWO. Thus, it has been analyzed that gender may influence the major academic differences
determining RWO.
The significance of the findings is that it signifies the necessity for higher education to facilitate
the possibility of a set of courses to the students which will help deal with unpredictable
challenges and complex decisions in the future (Jenkins & Andenoro, 2016). The findings based
on the benefits of CT will help the students to create useful tools and gain appropriate learning to
begin a professional career in the future. The combination of dispositions and skills generates
reasonable and rational way of thinking that may help in the future to evaluate regular settings
and subjects.
The findings will help in executing future research with RWO and HCTA, to gain adequate
knowledge regarding CT, along with its impact on higher education. However, this study is
considered to be a preliminary step based on the dependability of RWO in Portugal that will help
execute future research (Williams & Wright, 2019). In the future, the findings will help college

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students to enhance their performance and thinking. As a result, it will also help in making daily
life decisions and real-life situations.
Critical Evaluation
I agree that RWO can be utilized in cross-national study and also helps in improving intervention
efforts. For example, RWO is considered to be a self-report inventory that helps in measuring
problematic situations that occur in daily life (Ampuero, Miranda, Delgado, Goyen & Weaver,
2015).
I totally disagree with the perception of the author that the growth of cognitive skills is not
necessary in the field of humanities. For example, in the field of humanities, cognitive skills help
students to synthesize, consolidate, analyze and review knowledge critically.
The significant strength of the article is that it helps in analyzing the relationships among RWO
and CT by using HCTA and RWO. The evaluating and assessing of the real outcomes of CT
helps in acquiring a better understanding of the professional, academic and personal experiences
of the college students (Bandyopadhyay & Szostek, 2019). Another strength is that the study
made efficient use of supportive and positive classroom interactions among teacher and student.
This helped in gathering relevant knowledge regarding the importance of CT and also helped in
developing student’s thinking skills.
The study makes fewer use of a sample that represents both men and women by evaluating RWO
and HCTA which is regarded as the major weakness of the study. It would have helped in
gaining more data based on the quality of undergraduate’s life outcomes and CT.
According to my view, the study highly contributed to cross-cultural research, assessment of CT
in higher education and to the assessment field. This particular study is determined to be a factor
to ensure social legitimacy of the RWO in Portugal, that contributes to cross-cultural research
that considers CT by utilizing the HCTS and RWO (Wilkin, 2017). The study suggests that CT
plays a significant role in higher education that creates a positive impact on their academic
experience. Translating HCTA into Portuguese creates a huge impact on college students in
motivating their skills.

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It can be said that that study is highly advanced as it makes efficient use of the diversity of
opportunities and different sources of information that helps in enhancing further education and
democratize knowledge (Coombs & Bhattacharya, 2018).
Conclusion
The study helped in translating RWO from English to Portuguese to ensure cultural conversion
of variables for the college students. It also helped in finding major differences in RWO of
undergraduates based on gender and academic major. It has been observed that the linkage
among CT and RWO creates a positive impact on higher education that helps the college
students to develop their thinking skills.

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Reference
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