Developing critical thinking and information literacy as trasversal competences in higher education

The skills of Critical Thinking today are expressed as Informa- tion Literacy skills, or rather as the set of technical and methodological skills that enable the person to know where and how to look for information, to filter it effectively and above all to evaluate it adequately (Head & Eisenberg, 2010). The recent topic of “fake-news” and the consequent necessary fact-checking activities, stimulateds the attention in the edu- cational contexts: every student must be trained to these com- petences that will be useful during his curriculum of studies and also in the future work and life contexts. Many researches indicate that students have considerable difficulties in the se- lection and evaluation processes of online informations, and that they perform without an adequate method (Fawley & Krysak, 2012; Aesaert et al., 2014). They lack especially spe- cific metacognitive skills (Ilomäki et al. , 2016) in evaluating the sources and quality of documents. The article presents the results of an exploratory study on 184 high school students in the third and fourth years of the province of Padua. The results of the questionnaire highlight in their perceptions a consider- able overestimation of their Information Literacy skills and a strong demand for education /training especially from school and University.