Students' Critical Literacy in Higher Education: A Theory- Generating Meta-Synthesis Study

The aim of this study was to extract the grounded theory model of Students' Critical Literacy in Higher Education. The design of this research was a qualitative synthesis research of the Theory- Generating Meta- synthesis type and was carried out using the six-step method of Sandlowski and Barroso. In the first step, after selecting the Meta-synthesis team, the research questions were set up to extract the grounded theory model of the Students' Critical Literacy and the criteria for including the articles were determined. In the second step, a systematic search of resources in databases was performed. In the third step, the quality of the articles was evaluated and finally, according to the exclusion criteria, 53 original articles were selected. In the fourth step, open-source code was extracted using the classification technique and quantitative Meta-summery technique. In the fifth step, all the factors extracted from the research were considered as open code and then according to the reduction rules, considering the concept of each code, it was summarized and decreased to 14 axial codes and 5 selective codes (causal conditions, intervening conditions, context, strategies, consequences). In the sixth step, the findings were validated using validation and transferability techniques. The formation of students' critical literacy at the university level was an effective measure to socialize the concerns of the university, which requires the focus of planners and politicians on this educational strategy.