Critical thinking skills are of primary importance in tertiary-level education. Development of these skills marks the difference between secondary education with an emphasis on information-based learning and tertiary with its focus on critical analysis.  

Critical thinking is at the core of most intellectual activity that involves students in learning to recognise or develop an argument, use evidence in support of that argument, draw reasoned conclusions, and use information to solve problems. Examples of thinking skills are interpreting, analysing, evaluating, explaining, sequencing, reasoning, comparing, questioning, inferring,hypothesising, appraising, testing and generalising. Creative thinking involves students in learning to generate and apply new ideas in specific contexts, seeing existing situations in a new way, identifying alternative explanations, and seeing or making new links that generate a positive outcome. This includes combining parts to form something original, sifting and refining ideas to discover possibilities, constructing theories and objects, and acting on intuition. The products of creative endeavour can involve complex representations and images, investigations and performances, digital and computer-generated output, or occur as virtual reality.

These capabilities are particularly relevant to international students, many of whom come from educational systems in which critical thinking is not a feature of the approach to teaching and learning.