Efficiently navigating the flood of various information in the digital era requires critical reading abilities and research on how to support these skills. Today’s global society has been characterised as “post-truth”, referring to, for example, misleading news, propaganda machines, dishonest use of artificial intelligence and disinformation campaigns (Horne, 2021), which calls for critically reading and evaluating the multitude of information of varying quality (e.g. Paakkari et al., 2024; Strømsø & Kammerer, 2016). 

Despite their importance, however, critical reading skills are not mastered as well as they might be.  For example, in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) in 2022, it was found that less than 10% of the students were able to differentiate between a fact and an opinion or assess bias in complex texts (OECD, 2023). Also, assessing reliability or recognising bias causes difficulties for students in a commercial context (Kiili et al., 2018) as well as regarding health-related information (Paakkari et al., 2025). Moreover, not only children and adolescents, but adults, too, seem to struggle with evaluating information and sources (e.g. Andreassen & Bråten, 2013; Howe & Teufen, 2014; Kendrick & Fullerton, 2019). It is clear that systematic research on critical reading skills is thus needed in order to create effective evidence-based support that is targeted appropriately.   

Critical reading has been researched since the 1940’s. Still, to this day, the concept of critical reading has been defined in varying ways, which is complicating both the research field and the development of concrete pedagogical applications (e.g. Sutherland & Incera, 2021; Williams, 1959). The ways of understanding a concept are reflected in people’s thoughts and actions as individuals, researchers, practitioners and policymakers (Holt, 2016), and thus, to support the field, this paper reports a systematic conceptual review on how critical reading has been defined in the research literature. 

This paper can support future research as well as teaching and assessing critical reading skills by systematically collecting and analysing the existing definitions of critical reading for the first time. The present analysis of the definitions can serve as a foundation for understanding the components included in the concept, and it can be utilised by researchers as well as practitioners, for example, when planning studies or targeted pedagogical support.

In this review, the existing research literature was examined to identify how critical reading is conceptualised, to clarify said conceptualisations and to identify gaps and set ideas for future research (Jaakkola, 2020). The review process was conducted in a systematic manner to make sure that the reviewed literature is as comprehensive as possible (Hulland, 2020). The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) guidelines (Page et al., 2021) were applied when appropriate. Based on scoping preliminary searches, the search terms were determined as “critical reading”, “critical reading comprehension”, “critical online reading”, “critical internet reading” and “critical visual reading”. The databases used were PubMed (476 hits), Web of Science (2442 hits), ScienceDirect (252 hits), and ERIC (543 hits) and APA PsycInfo (404 hits) via EBSCO. After deleting the duplicates, 3257 articles were left to screen. Articles were included in the review, if they were peer-reviewed academic papers in English that mentioned at least one of the five search terms in the title, abstract, or keywords. They also had to portray critical reading in a context that refers to a skill, ability, or action that can be taught or acquired. In total, 555 papers met the inclusion criteria, and out of them, 205 contained explicit definitions of critical reading. The 1285 explicit definitions from the 205 papers were then categorised using an inductive and descriptive approach drawing on the general principles of qualitative analysis. The definitions were analysed in their original form and context to ensure that the results accurately represent the reviewed papers. Generic categories and sub-categories were formed. Due to the large number and diversity of the definitions, also frequency information was included descriptively to illustrate how commonly different ways of conceptualising critical reading appeared in the reviewed literature.

Critical reading has appeared as a concept in research literature since the 1940’s, but the nature of critical reading and the elements involved remain unclear (e.g. Sutherland & Incera, 2021; Williams, 1959). In this paper, the definitions of critical reading in the existing research literature have been systematically collected and analysed. The extracted definitions were grouped into five individual viewpoints that represent the different ways of conceptualising critical reading. The preliminary viewpoints are: 1) purposes of critical reading, 2) characterisations of critical reading, 3) focus areas of critical reading, 4) subskills of critical reading, and 5) relations to other skills or concepts. The frequency of expressions within each group highlights the most common ways of defining critical reading. According to the reviewed literature, critical reading was done in order to gain deep and comprehensive understanding, to make informed judgements and to gain personal and intellectual benefits. It was both a process and an ability characterised by active, analytic and personal engagement with texts. In critical reading the focus was on the elements of the multimodal texts, the author’s traits, source information, and the reader’s personal background. Critical reading incorporated over 200 subskills; evaluating, analysing, judging and interpreting being the most mentioned ones. Finally, critical reading was often defined in relation to other similar concepts or abilities, but the relation types varied between definitions in different papers and were sometimes contradictory. This paper fosters the common understanding of critical reading to benefit both the research community and professionals working with reading. By providing conceptual clarity and information about the central aspects in critical reading, this study helps design research contributions as well as create targeted practices to support critical reading skills.

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