A Meta-Synthesis of the Components of Students' Critical Literacy

Critical literacy of students with the production and modernization of knowledge and validity of knowledge claims to accurately evaluate texts (print-digital) in the age of information and communication technology. Therefore, the aim of this study was to identify the components of students' critical literacy in higher education.

The design of this research is a qualitative synthesis research of the type of Translation meta-synthesis.The statistical population of the study includes qualitative and mixed method scientific research articles published in prestigious journals in the field of critical literacy between 2010 to 2021 and 1389 to 1399.This research has been done using the six-step method of Sandlowski and Barroso.In the first step, after selecting the meta-synthesis team, the research question was set to discover the components of students' critical literacy in higher education and the criteria for including articles were identified. In the second step, a systematic search of resources in Latin databases was performed. In the third step, the quality of the articles was evaluated and finally, according to the exclusion criteria, 51 original articles were selected. In the fourth step, the basic themes were extracted by the technique of Classification the findings and the technique of Meta-summery. Validation of findings was also done with validation and transferability techniques.

By performing the fifth step of the six-step process of Sandlowski and Barroso, i.e. combining and presenting the findings, 37 basic themes were extracted, in 13 themes of the first level organizer and 4 organizers of the second level (knowledge, skill, attitude and social) as components of students' critical literacy were categorized.Finally, all the mentioned topics were presented in the form of the comprehensive theme of students' critical literacy. In the sixth step, the findings were validated.

After conducting the meta-synthesisresearch steps, the four components were described and finally the critical literacy framework was introduced as a social competence of students that can be the headline of curriculum policy makers at the university level during curriculum design.