The research presents a proposal for a comparative international study that emerges from Qian's PhD thesis supervised by Taysum that ties in with a Masters dual award developed by Taysum, Piskunova, Pogosian and Tropinova with colleagues from Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia. Chinese International Students had different epistemologies to other students on the course and this study reveals the modes of study they found helpful in developing transferable general skills for meeting competences for critical thinking. A model emerges for defining and understanding critical thinking using A Blueprint for Character Development for Evolution mapped to European Framework Competences for generic transferable skills for methods to address actual problems of social and humanitarian sciences and intercultural communication with a focus on language, culture, education and economics. This model needs to be tested for proof of concept through international comparative research.