The role of critical thinking in explaining students' academic achievement in undergraduate animal sciences programs.

Critical thinking skills are an in-demand trait of many STEM professionals, including animal scientists. Many instructors note the importance of critical thinking, but few have a clear understanding of what critical thinking means, how to teach to enhance the development of critical thinking skills, and how to assess the critical thinking as a student learning outcome. Many higher education institutions utilize student success prediction models with the hope that early prediction can be used to provide additional assistance to students when needed to improve the student success rate. These predictive models use high school GPA and standardized test scores, like the ACT and SAT, to predict academic success in college, but models have mixed success in their predictive capacity. The purpose of this study was to determine to what extent differences in critical thinking skills explain a difference between predicted and earned GPAs for first-time animal sciences students. Previous animal sciences students, on average, failed to achieve predicted overall GPAs (