The Impact of STEM Education on Students' Critical Thinking Skills: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

This systematic literature review examines the impact of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) education on developing students’ critical thinking skills. This review synthesizes studies from the last decade to assess how various STEM-based learning approaches can improve students’ critical thinking skills at multiple levels of education. By analyzing various empirical studies, this review explores the effectiveness of STEM activities based on project-based learning, hands-on experiments, and interdisciplinary approaches in promoting higher-order thinking skills, problem-solving abilities, and decision-making processes. This study aims to identify challenges and obstacles in the implementation of STEM education, such as a lack of teacher training, limited resources, and the need for curriculum alignment. We searched for publications from 2015 to 2025 in four bibliographic databases: Scopus, Eric, EBSCO, and ScienceDirect. We identified 96 articles, of which 23 met the critical thinking criteria and were systematically analyzed. These findings prove that STEM education positively impacts students’ critical thinking skills. Key factors such as discovery-based learning, problem-solving tasks, interdisciplinary teaching approaches, and collaborative learning were identified as significant contributors to the development of critical thinking. The research findings indicate that STEM education has great potential to enhance critical thinking skills among students, particularly when employing practical, collaborative, and discovery-based approaches. However, further high-quality, long-term studies are needed to confirm these effects and discourse methodological limitations in the current research.