Critical thinking and strategic processing have become ubiquitous both in the educational research literature as well as practice. However, neither of these constructs has had commonly agreed upon definitions or common agreement on how they relate to each other. This review first lays the conceptual stage for how these constructs have been defined and possible theoretical ways in which they could relate. Following this conceptual exploration, we present a systematic review that investigates how in the contemporary literature these constructs have been operationalized in the extant research literature. The primary finding of this review is that studies that investigate strategic processing and critical thinking have relied primarily on self-report surveys, the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire in particular. Recommendations for future research include explicitly conceptualizing critical thinking and strategies, diversifying the operationalization of these two constructs, and taking more of a developmental view of the co-relation between them.