Enhancing the immediate and delayed effects of college students’ CT based on the PLE-CT platform

As a core competency in 21st-century higher education, critical thinking (CT) has gained increasing attention. Yet, few online environments integrate pedagogical strategies to foster CT in a coherent way. Given its potential to support CT development, a Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) was designed based on a Real-World Practice CT framework (RWP-CT) to examine its immediate and delayed effects on university students’ CT.A quasi-experimental design was adopted, including 79 sophomore students who were assigned to an experimental group (using the PLE-CT platform) and a control group (using the RWP-CT framework). Data were collected through a pretest, posttest, delayed posttest, and semi-structured interviews. Quantitative data was analyzed using Generalized Estimating Equations, while qualitative data were examined through thematic analysis.The results revealed that the PLE-CT platform produced significant and large immediate effects on students’ overall CT performance, particularly in the subskills of analysis, open-mindedness, and application tendency. The qualitative findings further substantiated these quantitative results. However, in the delayed posttest conducted four months after the intervention, the experimental group showed no significant difference from its own pretest results, suggesting limited delayed effects. Nevertheless, when compared with the control group at the same stage, the experimental group maintained relative advantages in overall CT and open-mindedness. The study provides that the PLE-CT platform effectively enhances and partially maintains students’ CT, offering empirical support for developing personalized and systematic CT learning environments.