Can video lectures on enthymemes improve adult learners' critical thinking and clickbait detection skills?

Critical thinking is essential when navigating, evaluating, and interacting with media; therefore, it is important to investigate if adults’ critical thinking skills can be trained. This paper describes an experiment investigating the impact of video lectures about enthymemes and critical thinking skills on participants’ (N = 176) critical thinking skills, measured by the Watson–Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal (WGCTA) and on their ability to identify clickbait headlines. Participants were adults recruited through the Prolific Platform, and they were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: an enthymeme lecture, a general critical thinking lecture, or a control condition. The results indicated no significant improvement in critical thinking scores across the conditions, as measured by the WGCTA. Similarly, no significant differences were found in the participants’ ability to identify clickbait headlines. However, a significant positive correlation was observed between higher critical thinking scores and better clickbait recognition. These results suggest that a short lecture-based intervention may not be sufficient to significantly improve adult learners’ critical thinking. Perhaps this study indicates the need for more in-depth or interactive interventions to effectively support media literacy. The material presented here is a kind of counterexample of what should be done. For this reason, it may prove useful in future research to avoid certain experimental dead-ends.