The aim of this study is to compare, among urban secondary science pupils whose parents have high or low educational level, the critical thinking level of those submitted to real life problem solving activities with those who drilled routine exercises in the classroom and to identify the nature of the critical thinking skills they use.

The theoretical framework of this study is grounded in the interception between two main areas: critical thinking and problem solving. It was taken into account that pupils’ performance on problem solving is related mainly with the strategy and tactics area of critical thinking as defined by Ennis (1987), but also involves other four basic areas, all of them interrelated: i) elementary clarification, ii) basic support, iii) inference and iv) advanced clarification. Each area involves several skills, namely, the area elementary clarification involves focusing a question; the area basic support involves observing and judging the credibility of a source; the area inference involves deduction and induction and the area advanced clarification involves identifying assumptions.

In fact, it has been shown that using in the classroom problem solving activities of an open kind, with more than one possibly correct answer, with a variety of possible methods of finding it and embedded in real life contexts promotes the use of critical thinking skills and enhances pupils’ performance on problem solving (Hobden, 1998; Lee and Bae, 2008; McIntosh, 1995; Newman et al., 1999; Swartz et al., 1998; Wood, 2006). Also, across OECD countries the assessment of fifteen aged pupils in terms of their problem solving cross-disciplinary skills which are considered as a need to face real world challenges has been done by using problem solving activities embedded in real life contexts as instruments rather exercises stripped of detail and topic specific (OECD 2000, 2003, 2007, 2010).  

However, when pupils perform in the classroom real life problem solving activities, instead of academic exercises, research doesn’t point neither how do pupils whose parents have high or low educational level behave in terms of critical thinking level nor which critical thinking skills are used by them. So, it is useful to conduct further investigation on these outcomes.

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