why critical thinking is hard

5 Barriers to Critical Thinking

What holds us back from thinking critically in day-to-day situations.

Posted January 18, 2019 | Reviewed by Davia Sills

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Quite often, discussions of Critical Thinking (CT) revolve around tips for what you or your students should be doing to enhance CT ability. However, it seems that there’s substantially less discussion of what you shouldn’t be doing—that is, barriers to CT.

About a year ago, I posted "5 Tips for Critical Thinking" to this blog, and after thinking about it in terms of what not to do , along with more modern conceptualizations of CT (see Dwyer, 2017), I’ve compiled a list of five major barriers to CT. Of course, these are not the only barriers to CT; rather, they are five that may have the most impact on how one applies CT.

1. Trusting Your Gut

Trust your gut is a piece of advice often thrown around in the context of being in doubt. The concept of using intuitive judgment is actually the last thing you want to be doing if critical thinking is your goal. In the past, intuitive judgment has been described as "the absence of analysis" (Hamm, 1988); and automatic cognitive processing—which generally lacks effort, intention, awareness, or voluntary control—is usually experienced as perceptions or feelings (Kahneman, 2011; Lieberman, 2003).

Given that intuitive judgment operates automatically and cannot be voluntarily "turned off," associated errors and unsupported biases are difficult to prevent, largely because reflective judgment has not been consulted. Even when errors appear obvious in hindsight, they can only be prevented through the careful, self-regulated monitoring and control afforded by reflective judgment. Such errors and flawed reasoning include cognitive biases and logical fallacies .

Going with your gut—experienced as perceptions or feelings—generally leads the thinker to favor perspectives consistent with their own personal biases and experiences or those of their group.

2. Lack of Knowledge

CT skills are key components of what CT is, and in order to conduct it, one must know how to use these skills. Not knowing the skills of CT—analysis, evaluation, and inference (i.e., what they are or how to use them)—is, of course, a major barrier to its application. However, consideration of a lack of knowledge does not end with the knowledge of CT skills.

Let’s say you know what analysis, evaluation, and inference are, as well as how to apply them. The question then becomes: Are you knowledgeable in the topic area you have been asked to apply the CT? If not, intellectual honesty and reflective judgment should be engaged to allow you to consider the nature, limits, and certainty of what knowledge you do have, so that you can evaluate what is required of you to gain the knowledge necessary to make a critically thought-out judgment.

However, the barrier here may not necessarily be a lack of topic knowledge, but perhaps rather believing that you have the requisite knowledge to make a critically thought-out judgment when this is not the case or lacking the willingness to gain additional, relevant topic knowledge.

3. Lack of Willingness

In addition to skills, disposition towards thinking is also key to CT. Disposition towards thinking refers to the extent to which an individual is willing or inclined to perform a given thinking skill, and is essential for understanding how we think and how we can make our thinking better, in both academic settings and everyday circumstances (Norris, 1992; Siegel, 1999; Valenzuela, Nieto, & Saiz, 2011; Dwyer, Hogan & Stewart, 2014).

Dispositions can’t be taught, per se, but they do play a large role in determining whether or not CT will be performed. Simply, it doesn’t matter how skilled one is at analysis, evaluation, and inference—if they’re not willing to think critically, CT is not likely to occur.

4. Misunderstanding of Truth

Truth-seeking is one such disposition towards thinking, which refers to a desire for knowledge; to seek and offer both reasons and objections in an effort to inform and to be well-informed; a willingness to challenge popular beliefs and social norms by asking questions (of oneself and others); to be honest and objective about pursuing the truth, even if the findings do not support one’s self-interest or pre-conceived beliefs or opinions; and to change one’s mind about an idea as a result of the desire for truth (Dwyer, 2017).

Though this is something for which many of us strive or even just assume we do, the truth is that we all succumb to unwarranted assumptions from time to time: that is, beliefs presumed to be true without adequate justification. For example, we might make a judgment based on an unsubstantiated stereotype or a commonsense/belief statement that has no empirical evidence to justify it. When using CT, it’s important to distinguish facts from beliefs and, also, to dig a little deeper by evaluating "facts" with respect to how much empirical support they have to validate them as fact (see " The Dirtiest Word in Critical Thinking: 'Proof' and its Burden ").

Furthermore, sometimes the truth doesn’t suit people, and so, they might choose to ignore it or try and manipulate knowledge or understanding to accommodate their bias . For example, some people may engage in wishful thinking , in which they believe something is true because they wish it to be; some might engage in relativistic thinking , in which, for them, the truth is subjective or just a matter of opinion.

5. Closed-mindedness

In one of my previous posts, I lay out " 5 Tips for Critical Thinking "—one of which is to play Devil’s Advocate , which refers to the "consideration of alternatives." There’s always more than one way to do or think about something—why not engage such consideration?

The willingness to play Devil’s Advocate implies a sensibility consistent with open-mindedness (i.e., an inclination to be cognitively flexible and avoid rigidity in thinking; to tolerate divergent or conflicting views and treat all viewpoints alike, prior to subsequent analysis and evaluation; to detach from one’s own beliefs and consider, seriously, points of view other than one’s own without bias or self-interest; to be open to feedback by accepting positive feedback, and to not reject criticism or constructive feedback without thoughtful consideration; to amend existing knowledge in light of new ideas and experiences; and to explore such new, alternative, or "unusual" ideas).

At the opposite end of the spectrum, closed-mindedness is a significant barrier to CT. By this stage, you have probably identified the inherent nature of bias in our thinking. The first step of CT is always going to be to evaluate this bias. However, one’s bias may be so strong that it leads them to become closed-minded and renders them unwilling to consider any other perspectives.

Another way in which someone might be closed-minded is through having properly researched and critically thought about a topic and then deciding that this perspective will never change, as if their knowledge will never need to adapt. However, critical thinkers know that knowledge can change and adapt. An example I’ve used in the past is quite relevant here—growing up, I was taught that there were nine planets in our solar system; however, based on further research, our knowledge of planets has been amended to now only consider eight of those as planets.

Being open-minded is a valuable disposition, but so is skepticism (i.e., the inclination to challenge ideas; to withhold judgment before engaging all the evidence or when the evidence and reasons are insufficient; to take a position and be able to change position when the evidence and reasons are sufficient; and to look at findings from various perspectives).

However, one can be both open-minded and skeptical. It is closed-mindedness that is the barrier to CT, so please note that closed-mindedness and skepticism are distinct dispositions.

Dwyer, C.P. (2017). Critical thinking: Conceptual perspectives and practical guidelines. UK: Cambridge University Press.

Dwyer, C.P., Hogan, M.J. & Stewart, I. (2014). An integrated critical thinking framework for the 21st century. Thinking Skills & Creativity, 12, 43-52.

Hamm, R. M. (1988). Clinical intuition and clinical analysis: expertise and the cognitive continuum. In J. Dowie & A. Elstein (Eds.), Professional judgment: A reader in clinical decision making, 78–105. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking fast and slow. Penguin: Great Britain.

Lieberman, M. D. (2003). Reflexive and reflective judgment processes: A social cognitive neuroscience approach. Social Judgments: Implicit and Explicit Processes, 5, 44–67.

Norris, S. P. (Ed.). (1992). The generalizability of critical thinking: Multiple perspectives on an educational ideal. New York: Teachers College Press.

Siegel, H. (1999). What (good) are thinking dispositions? Educational Theory, 49, 2, 207–221.

Valenzuela, J., Nieto, A. M., & Saiz, C. (2011). Critical thinking motivational scale: A contribution to the study of relationship between critical thinking and motivation. Journal of Research in Educational Psychology, 9, 2, 823–848.

Christopher Dwyer, Ph.D., is a lecturer at the Technological University of the Shannon in Athlone, Ireland.

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Why is critical thinking difficult?

05 nov why is critical thinking difficult, students struggle to think critically.

85% of teachers thought critical thinking skills were inadequate when students reached post-16 education (TES). Our own qualitative research in schools revealed typical worries that students have such as: losing track of the argument; not planning before starting an essay; including irrelevant information. Examiners’ reports consistently point out the lack of a good argument in exam entries. Moreover, teachers express concern with regards to teaching of critical thinking skills. Students are often much better at learning facts than making a good argument, but there is no time to teach this properly in a content-heavy curriculum. The requirements to think critically have increased, but the textbooks and training have not always kept up.

Arguments are hidden in textbook prose

In school, students are introduced to critical thinking by reading and writing arguments in prose. The textbooks, articles and original sources they read are usually in prose, as are the essays they write. Prose is a very flexible medium, but it is not the optimal way to represent an argument.

Firstly, students cannot look at argumentative prose and immediately find the argument. Prose makes no distinction between the sentences which are part of the argument and those that do other things, such as supporting facts and context. So the argument is hidden amongst other information, much of which is distracting.

Prose is linear, but arguments are branched

Prose is written in a way that makes it hard to understand the structure of the argument. This is a problem, because the whole structure has to be kept in mind when evaluating the argument. For example, if they find a counter-example to one step of an argument, they need to know the structure to realise whether this defeats the whole argument or just a part of it.

Poor critical thinking leads to poor arguments

For these reasons, argumentative prose imposes a heavy cognitive load on the reader. Students are obliged to work hard to discover how an argument works before they can even begin to critique it. This is especially difficult for those who have reading difficulties such as dyslexia.

School students normally create their own arguments by writing essays. Even if they are well-informed they often write a lot of facts without pulling them together into an argument. The very flexibility of prose allows essays to be unrigorous, ambiguous, and irrelevant. Moreover, essays are slow for students to write and slow for teachers to check and mark, limiting the amount of arguments that can be studied in detail. For these reasons, learning critical thinking through school work is difficult and its results are patchy.

At Endoxa Learning, we design resources that make it easier for students to read, understand and create arguments.

What is critical thinking?

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How to build critical thinking skills for better decision-making

It’s simple in theory, but tougher in practice – here are five tips to get you started.

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Have you heard the riddle about two coins that equal thirty cents, but one of them is not a nickel? What about the one where a surgeon says they can’t operate on their own son?

Those brain teasers tap into your critical thinking skills. But your ability to think critically isn’t just helpful for solving those random puzzles – it plays a big role in your career. 

An impressive 81% of employers say critical thinking carries a lot of weight when they’re evaluating job candidates. It ranks as the top competency companies consider when hiring recent graduates (even ahead of communication ). Plus, once you’re hired, several studies show that critical thinking skills are highly correlated with better job performance.

So what exactly are critical thinking skills? And even more importantly, how do you build and improve them? 

What is critical thinking?

Critical thinking is the ability to evaluate facts and information, remain objective, and make a sound decision about how to move forward.

Does that sound like how you approach every decision or problem? Not so fast. Critical thinking seems simple in theory but is much tougher in practice, which helps explain why 65% of employers say their organization has a need for more critical thinking. 

In reality, critical thinking doesn’t come naturally to a lot of us. In order to do it well, you need to:

• Remain open-minded and inquisitive, rather than relying on assumptions or jumping to conclusions
• Ask questions and dig deep, rather than accepting information at face value
• Keep your own biases and perceptions in check to stay as objective as possible
• Rely on your emotional intelligence to fill in the blanks and gain a more well-rounded understanding of a situation

So, critical thinking isn’t just being intelligent or analytical. In many ways, it requires you to step outside of yourself, let go of your own preconceived notions, and approach a problem or situation with curiosity and fairness.

It’s a challenge, but it’s well worth it. Critical thinking skills will help you connect ideas, make reasonable decisions, and solve complex problems.

7 critical thinking skills to help you dig deeper

Critical thinking is often labeled as a skill itself (you’ll see it bulleted as a desired trait in a variety of job descriptions). But it’s better to think of critical thinking less as a distinct skill and more as a collection or category of skills. 

To think critically, you’ll need to tap into a bunch of your other soft skills. Here are seven of the most important. 

Open-mindedness

It’s important to kick off the critical thinking process with the idea that anything is possible. The more you’re able to set aside your own suspicions, beliefs, and agenda, the better prepared you are to approach the situation with the level of inquisitiveness you need. 

That means not closing yourself off to any possibilities and allowing yourself the space to pull on every thread – yes, even the ones that seem totally implausible.

As Christopher Dwyer, Ph.D. writes in a piece for Psychology Today , “Even if an idea appears foolish, sometimes its consideration can lead to an intelligent, critically considered conclusion.” He goes on to compare the critical thinking process to brainstorming . Sometimes the “bad” ideas are what lay the foundation for the good ones. 

Open-mindedness is challenging because it requires more effort and mental bandwidth than sticking with your own perceptions. Approaching problems or situations with true impartiality often means:

• Practicing self-regulation : Giving yourself a pause between when you feel something and when you actually react or take action.
• Challenging your own biases: Acknowledging your biases and seeking feedback are two powerful ways to get a broader understanding. 

Critical thinking example

In a team meeting, your boss mentioned that your company newsletter signups have been decreasing and she wants to figure out why.

At first, you feel offended and defensive – it feels like she’s blaming you for the dip in subscribers. You recognize and rationalize that emotion before thinking about potential causes. You have a hunch about what’s happening, but you will explore all possibilities and contributions from your team members.

Observation

Observation is, of course, your ability to notice and process the details all around you (even the subtle or seemingly inconsequential ones). Critical thinking demands that you’re flexible and willing to go beyond surface-level information, and solid observation skills help you do that.

Your observations help you pick up on clues from a variety of sources and experiences, all of which help you draw a final conclusion. After all, sometimes it’s the most minuscule realization that leads you to the strongest conclusion.

Over the next week or so, you keep a close eye on your company’s website and newsletter analytics to see if numbers are in fact declining or if your boss’s concerns were just a fluke. 

Critical thinking hinges on objectivity. And, to be objective, you need to base your judgments on the facts – which you collect through research. You’ll lean on your research skills to gather as much information as possible that’s relevant to your problem or situation. 

Keep in mind that this isn’t just about the quantity of information – quality matters too. You want to find data and details from a variety of trusted sources to drill past the surface and build a deeper understanding of what’s happening. 

You dig into your email and website analytics to identify trends in bounce rates, time on page, conversions, and more. You also review recent newsletters and email promotions to understand what customers have received, look through current customer feedback, and connect with your customer support team to learn what they’re hearing in their conversations with customers.

The critical thinking process is sort of like a treasure hunt – you’ll find some nuggets that are fundamental for your final conclusion and some that might be interesting but aren’t pertinent to the problem at hand.

That’s why you need analytical skills. They’re what help you separate the wheat from the chaff, prioritize information, identify trends or themes, and draw conclusions based on the most relevant and influential facts. 

It’s easy to confuse analytical thinking with critical thinking itself, and it’s true there is a lot of overlap between the two. But analytical thinking is just a piece of critical thinking. It focuses strictly on the facts and data, while critical thinking incorporates other factors like emotions, opinions, and experiences. 

As you analyze your research, you notice that one specific webpage has contributed to a significant decline in newsletter signups. While all of the other sources have stayed fairly steady with regard to conversions, that one has sharply decreased.

You decide to move on from your other hypotheses about newsletter quality and dig deeper into the analytics. 

One of the traps of critical thinking is that it’s easy to feel like you’re never done. There’s always more information you could collect and more rabbit holes you could fall down.

But at some point, you need to accept that you’ve done your due diligence and make a decision about how to move forward. That’s where inference comes in. It’s your ability to look at the evidence and facts available to you and draw an informed conclusion based on those. 

When you’re so focused on staying objective and pursuing all possibilities, inference can feel like the antithesis of critical thinking. But ultimately, it’s your inference skills that allow you to move out of the thinking process and onto the action steps. 

You dig deeper into the analytics for the page that hasn’t been converting and notice that the sharp drop-off happened around the same time you switched email providers.

After looking more into the backend, you realize that the signup form on that page isn’t correctly connected to your newsletter platform. It seems like anybody who has signed up on that page hasn’t been fed to your email list. 

Communication

3 ways to improve your communication skills at work

If and when you identify a solution or answer, you can’t keep it close to the vest. You’ll need to use your communication skills to share your findings with the relevant stakeholders – like your boss, team members, or anybody who needs to be involved in the next steps.

Your analysis skills will come in handy here too, as they’ll help you determine what information other people need to know so you can avoid bogging them down with unnecessary details. 

In your next team meeting, you pull up the analytics and show your team the sharp drop-off as well as the missing connection between that page and your email platform. You ask the web team to reinstall and double-check that connection and you also ask a member of the marketing team to draft an apology email to the subscribers who were missed. 

Problem-solving

Critical thinking and problem-solving are two more terms that are frequently confused. After all, when you think critically, you’re often doing so with the objective of solving a problem.

The best way to understand how problem-solving and critical thinking differ is to think of problem-solving as much more narrow. You’re focused on finding a solution.

In contrast, you can use critical thinking for a variety of use cases beyond solving a problem – like answering questions or identifying opportunities for improvement. Even so, within the critical thinking process, you’ll flex your problem-solving skills when it comes time to take action. 

Once the fix is implemented, you monitor the analytics to see if subscribers continue to increase. If not (or if they increase at a slower rate than you anticipated), you’ll roll out some other tests like changing the CTA language or the placement of the subscribe form on the page.

5 ways to improve your critical thinking skills

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Think critically about critical thinking and you’ll quickly realize that it’s not as instinctive as you’d like it to be. Fortunately, your critical thinking skills are learned competencies and not inherent gifts – and that means you can improve them. Here’s how:

• Practice active listening: Active listening helps you process and understand what other people share. That’s crucial as you aim to be open-minded and inquisitive.
• Ask open-ended questions: If your critical thinking process involves collecting feedback and opinions from others, ask open-ended questions (meaning, questions that can’t be answered with “yes” or “no”). Doing so will give you more valuable information and also prevent your own biases from influencing people’s input.
• Scrutinize your sources: Figuring out what to trust and prioritize is crucial for critical thinking. Boosting your media literacy and asking more questions will help you be more discerning about what to factor in. It’s hard to strike a balance between skepticism and open-mindedness, but approaching information with questions (rather than unquestioning trust) will help you draw better conclusions. 
• Play a game: Remember those riddles we mentioned at the beginning? As trivial as they might seem, games and exercises like those can help you boost your critical thinking skills. There are plenty of critical thinking exercises you can do individually or as a team . 
• Give yourself time: Research shows that rushed decisions are often regrettable ones. That’s likely because critical thinking takes time – you can’t do it under the wire. So, for big decisions or hairy problems, give yourself enough time and breathing room to work through the process. It’s hard enough to think critically without a countdown ticking in your brain. 

Critical thinking really is critical

The ability to think critically is important, but it doesn’t come naturally to most of us. It’s just easier to stick with biases, assumptions, and surface-level information. 

But that route often leads you to rash judgments, shaky conclusions, and disappointing decisions. So here’s a conclusion we can draw without any more noodling: Even if it is more demanding on your mental resources, critical thinking is well worth the effort.

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Failing to Improve Critical Thinking

By  Ben Paris

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Educators and employers agree that critical thinking is one of the essential skills required for postgraduation success. Unfortunately, multiple surveys indicate that employers believe that recent grads do not have the critical-thinking skills those employers expect, although recent grads (surprise!) have a sunnier view of their capabilities.

Whether recent grads are up to standard or not, there’s evidence that the college experience does not do enough to improve those skills, and not a lot of evidence that it does. In “Higher Ed’s Biggest Gamble,” John Schlueter takes this case even further, questioning whether the college experience can even in principle build those skills.

I’m more optimistic. In contexts ranging from higher education to corporate training to test preparation, I’ve helped thousands of learners improve their skills and found nothing unique about that process. While aptitude for critical thinking is clearly not distributed equally in the population, no one is an expert critical thinker from birth. Even the best of us had to learn it somewhere.

That said, it isn’t easy. We can improve critical-thinking skills, in college or elsewhere, but doing so requires a commitment, an understanding of the nature of the task and deep learning experiences.

What makes teaching and improving critical-thinking skills so difficult? Here are a few factors:

• Definitions. There’s no general agreement on what critical thinking is. Whereas people don’t often debate the properties of exponents or the components of a complete sentence, we’re less aligned when it comes to critical thinking. It often gets confused with creative thinking, reflective thinking or other skills.
• Complexity. Critical-thinking tasks tend to be much more difficult than others in part because critical thinking needs to be built on a foundation of language and comprehension. Also, some of the issues involved when analyzing statements and arguments are quite subtle. Moreover, many people resist the notion that anything could be wrong with their thinking process, and those with the weakest skills tend to be the most resistant.
• Abstraction. Critical thinking is not a list of facts to memorize. It’s a process, a general way of approaching problems. That means learners have to connect the general lessons they’ve learned to totally new situations. Common patterns emerge, but learners have to recognize them in order to leverage critical-thinking training.
• Contrast. Modern education too often focuses on memorization, compliance and endurance rather than critical thought. Educational experiences based on “drill and kill” reward people who follow instructions and punish people who are more critical. Of course, people who succeeded in college by doing as they were told often have trouble solving real-world problems that are new and different. Critical thinkers do well in the long run, but they often have to survive a culture that teaches them not to be critical.
• Training. We ask a lot of our instructors. They need to know their subject matter, of course, but they also need to know about education itself while developing the communication skills to connect with a diverse group of learners. Most faculty members haven’t been trained in critical thinking, and while they can pick it up, they’ll need consistent and sophisticated support to do so.
• Measurement. Writing is hard. Writing assessments is very hard. Writing critical-thinking assessments is extremely hard. While some maintain that critical thinking cannot be measured at all, or can only be measured by complex items such as essays, it is possible to create valid measures of critical-thinking skills such as identifying assumptions, analyzing arguments and making inferences. But even assessment writers have a hard time writing those questions.

Why What We’re Doing Isn’t Working

By now, it should be clear that improving critical-thinking skills in college or anywhere else is a tall order under the best of circumstances. But what we have now is far from the best of circumstances, and that is not an accident. We can lament our failure to improve critical-thinking skills, but the truth is that this failure is not really a bug in the system. It’s a feature that flows from the structure of the current college experience.

Critical thinking, like other higher-order skills, gets crowded out in college courses that try to cover as much of the subject matter as possible. In the large introductory courses, with the largest number of students per class, students devote instructional time to a wide range of topics because no one wants to leave anything out. That forces the students into a breakneck pace that leaves little time for anything more than learning the vocabulary of the discipline -- vocabulary that mostly gets forgotten just after the final exam. If critical thinking is addressed at all, it tends to be tacked onto the core content in a manner that everyone can tell is contrived. Students might be invited to reflect on potentially interesting topics, but few will do so without meaningful feedback and some kind of credit toward a good grade.

Too many classes are this way, but the bigger problem is that they tend to stay this way. Faculty members who have their class structure set tend to be reluctant to radically change anything, especially when the change would require them to develop new expertise, as is often the case with critical thinking. Moreover, introducing critical thinking into an already-stuffed course tends to lower grades, as critical-thinking questions tend to be difficult and different from what students are accustomed to.

Also, it can be hard to convince faculty members to make a change that would likely hurt their evaluations -- and possibly their employment -- and often those evaluations depend on the grades that students receive. That’s why when critical thinking is included in courses, it sometimes gets covered in a way that poses no threat to anyone’s grades. What should be a rigorous analysis of evidence and conclusion instead becomes a glorified opinion poll. Students say whatever they want about the subject, and then … nothing.

What Would Be Better?

The path to improving critical-thinking skills starts with awareness. We must recognize that the world has changed and that possessing information and being able to execute rote procedures is not enough. Anyone who merely follows instructions is at risk of being replaced by someone cheaper or a machine.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that actively analyzing decisions leads to better outcomes, and the people who can do that will drive innovation and organizational success, no matter where they wind up. We need instructors and students to recognize the importance of critical thinking and be inspired with its potential to improve the world. It also requires a commitment to do justice to critical-thinking and other higher-order skills. It means accepting that courses won’t cover as many subjects, but they’ll do a better job with the ones they do cover.

Along the way, we should encourage learners who have been raised on a diet of compliance and social control to take a critical mind-set. But that doesn’t mean that we should teach them that all arguments are equally valid and that the truth is whatever you decide it is at that moment. Just as we learn to raise our standards when analyzing the claims of others, we also need to apply high standards to our own thinking. That’s why critical thinking can be an important part of self-improvement. It can help you get what you want, but it can also help you decide what you want to want.

We also have to arrive at a reasonable and workable definition of critical thinking and its related concepts. I’m not recommending that we create some semisecret code language to exclude “nonexperts” from the conversation. Education has enough of that already. However, we should come to a common understanding of terms such as assumption , relevance , argument and critical thinking itself.

The dictionary is a fine starting point, and we should add to ordinary definitions only when the interests of clarity call for it. For example, here’s the definition of critical thinking we use at my company:

Critical thinking is the ability to evaluate the connection between evidence and potential conclusions. It is the ability to make logically sound judgments, identify assumptions and alternatives, ask relevant questions, and to be fair and open-minded when evaluating the strength of arguments.

That covers the essential elements of the concept without requiring a doctoral dissertation. Others are of course free to disagree, to add, to subtract or to alter, but any meaningful definition of critical thinking is likely to include those core elements. This definition, or something like it, can be part of a shared and inclusive vocabulary that will help us identify the point at issue, the terms of the argument and the standards by which we make decisions.

With a clear and flexible structure, we make great progress, but it also helps to spot patterns of reasoning that appear across academic disciplines and real-world environments. While every situation could be different, being able to spot analogous situations can help us apply lessons we learned from our previous experience. No matter where we go, we should watch out for causation issues, representativeness and the difference between necessity and sufficiency. We should identify scope shifts, alternative explanations and ambiguous terms. Critical thinking will never be a mechanical application of procedures, but it still helps to have a sense of the usual suspects when it comes to logic.

While critical thinking is, by its nature, abstract, it also should be an applied field. For that reason, part of the process of improving one’s critical-thinking skills is to solve problems in real-world contexts and to practice drawing connections between the abstract concepts of critical thinking and the facts on the ground. Let’s not underestimate the value of practice, either. Critical thinking is like other skills in that it gets better with practice, but it has to be the right kind of practice. Pure repetition won’t help, but careful analysis will. That’s why we need to evaluate the claims we hear in everyday life, examine critiques of arguments to see if they have represented their subject fairly and construct our own persuasive arguments -- holding ourselves to the same standards we apply to others.

To illustrate the results of this process, consider this true story of critical-thinking success. On his first day at his new publishing job, an editor got bad news: samples from a new print job had come in, and they had a huge flaw that made all the books unusable. He was asked if he wanted to trash the entire print run. He would not have been blamed if he had, but instead he asked if they were sure that all of the books had that flaw. As it turned out, they didn’t. It was only some of them, and so he saved thousands of books from going to the landfill for no good reason.

For this to happen, he needed to be aware that he needed to apply his critical-thinking skills, he needed a structure to analyze the situation, he needed to recognize a familiar pattern of reasoning (in this case, representative samples) and he needed to apply what he knew from the publishing context . In this case, he knew that print samples sometimes come from only one round of printing and may not represent the entire print job. It was an insightful decision, but it wasn’t magic. Decisions like this are the natural product of sophisticated learning processes reinforced with experience.

But Can Critical Thinking Truly Be Improved?

It isn’t easy, and aptitude varies, but critical-thinking skills are not fixed at birth. We know that some people have strong skills, and they had to get them from somewhere. People still debate the extent to which critical thinking is a general skill that can be transferred whole into any context as opposed to being a context-dependent skill. The truth could be somewhat in between. There are certain structures, patterns and techniques that can be learned in general and applied elsewhere.

That is what I did while creating preparation courses for exams such as the LSAT and GMAT. We never knew exactly what the subject matter of the questions would be, but that didn’t matter as long as the patterns of reasoning were the same. That being said, context still matters, and applying one’s general skills is not equally easy everywhere.

My friend who made the inspired call about the print job had strong thinking skills but also needed to know something about publishing in order to find that solution. So there’s something to the notion that we ought to integrate critical thinking into our courses of study and not teach it as an entirely separate discipline. That’s another debate.

For now, I hope to have advanced the case that everyone can get better at critical thinking, but only if we make it a priority. The fact that we haven’t made great progress is evidence that we haven’t tried more than it is evidence that we can’t.

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Critical Thinking and Decision-Making  - Why is it So Hard to Make Decisions?

Critical thinking and decision-making  -, why is it so hard to make decisions, critical thinking and decision-making why is it so hard to make decisions.

Critical Thinking and Decision-Making: Why is it So Hard to Make Decisions?

Lesson 2: why is it so hard to make decisions.

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The challenge of making decisions

No matter who you are or what you do for a living, you make thousands of minor decisions every day . Most are relatively inconsequential; for example, what do you want for breakfast? Do you want coffee, tea, or something else?

Other decisions are much more complex . Should you accept a new job? Should you move to a different city? What about buying a house, or starting a family? These decisions weigh more heavily because they can impact your life in many ways.

You might feel like you're bad at making decisions (or not good at making good ones). However, it's something we all struggle with due to the way our brains are made. Behind every decision, there are secret psychological factors that shape the way we think and act. Understanding these factors can make them easier to overcome.

Watch the video below to learn more about the psychology of decision-making.

Status quo bias

Many missteps in decision-making can be chalked up to cognitive bias . That's our tendency to think a certain way without even realizing it. Here's a simple example: Have you ever avoided switching Internet providers, even though you were unhappy with your current service?

Something called status quo bias might be to blame. That's our tendency to stick with what we know, instead of choosing something new and different. We see the alternative as a risk or just not worth the trouble, even if it might be better. Without realizing it, we can become overly resistant to change.

Anchoring bias

Anchoring bias can also affect the choices we make. To understand how anchoring works, imagine you're shopping for a used car at a local dealership. The model you like is priced at $9,999.

Next, imagine the dealer offers you a discount. The car is now $8,999, a full thousand dollars less. Sounds like a can't-miss opportunity, right? Not necessarily.

Anchoring suggests that we rely too heavily on the first thing we hear (in this case, the initial price of the car). That's what makes the discount so appealing, but it shouldn't be the deciding factor. There are also more objective things to consider, like how much the car is really worth, and whether you can find a better price elsewhere. If you're not careful, the anchoring effect can weigh you down.

Choice overload

Cognitive biases aren't the only things that can affect decision-making. More and more studies show that stress can have an impact—both on the quality of our decisions and on our ability to make them. Take this well-known study about jam.

At an upscale food market, researchers set up two displays offering free samples of jam . One gave customers six different flavors to choose from; the other gave them 24.

The larger display attracted more people, but they were six times less likely to actually buy a jar of jam (compared to those who visited the smaller display). The reason for this is a phenomenon now known as choice overload .

Choice overload can happen any time we feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of options. We have such a hard time comparing them that we're less likely to choose anything at all. As in the jam example, many of us would sooner walk away empty-handed than deal with the stress of choosing from such a large selection.

Decision fatigue

A similar thing happens when we're forced to make multiple decisions one after another—a common occurrence in everyday life. We experience an effect psychologists call decision fatigue .

Decision fatigue suggests that making a large number of decisions over a prolonged period of time can be a significant drain on our willpower. The result? We have a harder time saying no —to things like junk food, impulse buys, and other tempting offers.

On the flip side, fatigue can also make it harder to say yes , especially to decisions that would upset the status quo.

Fatigue makes it difficult to even think about making decisions, let alone what's right or wrong, correct or incorrect. We follow the path of least resistance because it's the easiest thing to do.

The upside of uncertainty

Making decisions will always be difficult because it takes time and energy to weigh your options. Things like second-guessing yourself and feeling indecisive are just a part of the process.

In many ways, they're a good thing—a sign that you're thinking about your choices instead of just going with the flow. That's the first step to making better, more thoughtful decisions.

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Critical Thinking Skills: Why They Are So Difficult To Acquire

Critical thinking skills are difficult to acquire because the mind is a believing machine, as this classic psychology study demonstrates.

What is the mind’s default position to critical thinking: are we naturally critical or naturally gullible?

As a species do we have a tendency to behave like Agent Mulder from the X-Files who always wanted to believe in mythical monsters and alien abductions?

Or are we like his partner Agent Scully who applied critical thinking, generating alternative explanations, trying to understand and evaluate the strange occurrences they encountered rationally?

Do we believe what the TV, the newspapers, blogs even, tell us at first blush or do we use critical thinking processes?

Can we ignore the claims of adverts, do we lap up what politicians tell us, do we believe our lover’s promises?

It’s not just that some people do think critically and some people don’t think critically; in fact all our minds are built with the same first instinct, the same first reaction to new information.

But what is it: do we believe first or do we first understand, so that belief (or disbelief) comes later?

Critical thinking skills: Descartes vs. Spinoza

This argument about whether belief is automatic when we are first exposed to an idea or whether belief is a separate process that follows understanding has been going on for at least 400 years.

The French philosopher, mathematician and physicist René Descartes (below, right) argued that understanding and believing are two separate processes.

First, people take in some information by paying attention to it, then they decide what to do with that information, which includes believing or disbelieving it.

Descartes’ view is intuitively attractive and seems to accord with the way our minds work, or at least the way we would like our minds to work.

The Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, a contemporary of Descartes, took a quite different view.

He thought that the very act of understanding information was believing it.

We may, he thought, be able to change our minds afterwards, say when we come across evidence to the contrary, but until that time we believe everything.

Spinoza’s approach is unappealing because it suggests we have to waste our energy using critical thinking to root out falsities that other people have randomly sprayed in our direction, whether by word of mouth, TV, the internet or any other medium of communication.

So who was right, Spinoza or Descartes?

Research on critical thinking skills

Daniel Gilbert and colleagues put these two theories head-to-head in a series of experiments to test whether understanding and belief operate together or whether belief (or disbelief) comes later ( Gilbert et al., 1993 ).

In their classic social psychology experiment on critical thinking, seventy-one participants read statements about two robberies then gave the robber a jail sentence.

Some of the statements were designed to make the crime seem worse, for example the robber had a gun, and others to make it look less serious, for example the robber had starving children to feed.

The twist was that only some of the statements were true, while others were false.

Participants were told that all the statements that were true would be displayed in green type, while the false statement would be in red.

Here’s the clever bit: half the participants where purposefully distracted while they were reading the false statements while the other half weren’t.

In theory, if Spinoza was correct, then those who were distracted while reading the false statements wouldn’t have time to process the additional fact that the statement was written in red and therefore not true, and consequently would be influenced by it in the jail term they gave to the criminal.

On the other hand, if Descartes was right then the distraction would make no difference as participants wouldn’t have time to believe or not believe the false statements so it wouldn’t make any difference to the jail term.

The reason critical thinking is difficult

The results showed that when the false statements made the crime seem much worse rather than less serious, the participants who were interrupted gave the criminals almost twice as long in jail, up from about 6 years to around 11 years.

In contrast, the group in which participants hadn’t been interrupted managed to ignore the false statements.

Consequently, there was no significant difference between jail terms depending on whether false statements made the crime seem worse or less serious.

This meant that only when given time to think about it did people behave as though the false statements were actually false.

On the other hand, without time for reflection, people simply believed what they read.

Gilbert and colleagues carried out further experiments to successfully counter some alternative explanations of their results.

These confirmed their previous findings and led them to the rather disquieting conclusion that Descartes was in error and Spinoza was right.

Believing is not a two-stage process involving first understanding then believing.

Instead understanding is believing, a fraction of a second after reading it, you believe it until some other critical faculty kicks in to change your mind.

We really do want to believe, just like Agent Mulder and naturally lack the critical thinking skills of Agent Scully.

Believe first, ask questions later

Not only that, but their conclusions, and those of Spinoza, also explain other behaviours that people regularly display:

• The fundamental attribution error : this is people’s assumption that others’ behaviour reflects their personality, when really it reflects the situation.
• Truthfulness bias: people tend to assume that others are telling the truth, even when they are lying.
• The persuasion effect: when people are distracted it increases the persuasiveness of a message.
• Denial-innuendo effect: people tend to positively believe in things that are being categorically denied.
• Hypothesis testing bias: when testing a theory, instead of trying to prove it wrong people tend to look for information that confirms it. This, of course, isn’t very effective hypothesis testing!

When looked at in light of Spinoza’s claim that understanding is believing, these biases and effects could result from our tendency to believe first and ask questions later.

Take the fundamental attribution error: when meeting someone who is nervous we may assume they are a nervous person because this is the most obvious inference to make.

It only occurs to us later, when applying critical thinking skills, that they might have been worried because they were waiting for important test results.

If all this is making your feel rather uncomfortable then you’re not alone.

Gilbert and colleagues concede that our credulous mentality seems like bad news.

It may even be an argument for limiting freedom of speech.

After all, if people automatically believe everything they see and hear, we have to be very careful about what people see and hear.

Disadvantages of too much critical thinking

Gilbert and colleagues counter this by arguing that too much critical thinking or even cynicism is not a good thing.

Minds working on a Descartian model would only believe things for which they had hard evidence.

Everything else would be neither believed or not believed, but in a state of limbo.

The problem is that a lot of the information we are exposed to is actually true, and some of it is vital for our survival.

If we had to go around applying critical thinking to our beliefs all the time, we’d never get anything done and miss out on some great opportunities.

Minds that work on a Spinozan model, however, can happily believe as a general rule of thumb, then check out anything that seems dodgy later.

Yes, they will often believe things that aren’t true, but it’s better to believe too much and be caught out once in a while than be too cynical and fail to capitalise on the useful and beneficial information that is actually true.

Or maybe by going along with this argument I’m being gullible and the harsh truth is that it’s a basic human failing that we are all too quick to take things at face value and too slow to engage our critical thinking.

I’ll leave you to ponder that one.

Author: Dr Jeremy Dean

Psychologist, Jeremy Dean, PhD is the founder and author of PsyBlog. He holds a doctorate in psychology from University College London and two other advanced degrees in psychology. He has been writing about scientific research on PsyBlog since 2004. View all posts by Dr Jeremy Dean

Join the free PsyBlog mailing list. No spam, ever.

Ask the Cognitive Scientist: How Can Educators Teach Critical Thinking?

How does the mind work—and especially how does it learn? Teachers’ instructional decisions are based on a mix of theories learned in teacher education, trial and error, craft knowledge, and gut instinct. Such knowledge often serves us well, but is there anything sturdier to rely on?

Cognitive science is an interdisciplinary field of researchers from psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy, computer science, and anthropology who seek to understand the mind. In this regular American Educator column, we consider findings from this field that are strong and clear enough to merit classroom application.

I ndividuals vary in their views of what students should be taught, but there is little disagreement on the importance of critical thinking skills. In free societies, the ability to think critically is viewed as a cornerstone of individual civic engagement and economic success.

Despite this consensus, it’s not always clear what’s meant by “critical thinking.” I will offer a commonsensical view. 1 You are thinking critically if (1) your thinking is novel—that is, you aren’t simply drawing a conclusion from a memory of a previous situation; (2) your thinking is self-directed—that is, you are not merely executing instructions given by someone else; and (3) your thinking is effective—that is, you respect certain conventions that make thinking more likely to yield useful conclusions. These would be conventions like “consider both sides of an issue,” “offer evidence for claims made,” and “don’t let emotion interfere with reason.” This third characteristic will be our main concern, and as we’ll see, what constitutes effective thinking varies from domain to domain.

Critical Thinking Can Be Taught

Planning how to teach students to think critically should perhaps be our second task. Our first should be to ask whether evidence shows that explicitly teaching critical thinking brings any benefit.

There are many examples of critical thinking skills that are open to instruction. 2 For example, in one experiment, researchers taught college students principles for evaluating evidence in psychology studies—principles like the difference between correlational research and true experiments, and the difference between anecdote and formal research. 3 These principles were incorporated into regular instruction in a psychology class, and their application was practiced in that context. Compared to a control group that learned principles of memory, students who learned the critical thinking principles performed better on a test that required evaluation of psychology evidence.

But perhaps we should not find this result terribly surprising. You tell students, “This is a good strategy for this type of problem,” and you have them practice that strategy, so later they use that strategy when they encounter the problem.

When we think of critical thinking, we think of something bigger than its domain of training. When I teach students how to evaluate the argument in a set of newspaper editorials, I’m hoping that they will learn to evaluate arguments generally, not just the ones they read. The research literature on successful transfer of learning * to new problems is less encouraging.

Teaching Critical Thinking for General Transfer

It’s a perennial idea—teach something that requires critical thinking, and such thinking will become habitual. In the 19th century, educators suggested that Latin and geometry demanded logical thinking, which would prompt students to think logically in other contexts. 4 The idea was challenged by psychologist Edward Thorndike, who compared scores from standardized tests that high school students took in autumn and spring as a function of the coursework they had taken during the year. If Latin, for example, makes you smart, students who take it should score better in the spring. They didn’t. 5

In the 1960s, computer programming replaced Latin as the discipline that would lead to logical thinking. 6 Studies through the 1980s showed mixed results, 7 but a recent meta-analysis offered some apparently encouraging results about the general trainability of computational thinking. 8 The researchers reported that learning to program a computer yielded modest positive transfer to measures of creative thinking, mathematics, metacognition, spatial skills, and reasoning. It’s sensible to think that this transfer was a consequence of conceptual overlap between programming and these skills, as no benefit was observed in measures of literacy.

Hopeful adults have tried still other activities as potential all-purpose enhancers of intelligence—for example, exposure to classical music (the so-called Mozart effect), 9 learning to play a musical instrument, 10 or learning to play chess. 11 None have succeeded as hoped.

It’s no surprise then that programs in school meant to teach general critical thinking skills have had limited success. Unfortunately, the evaluations of these programs seldom offer a good test of transfer; the measure of success tends to feature the same sort of task that was used during training. 12 When investigators have tested for transfer in such curricular programs, positive results have been absent or modest and quick to fade. 13

Transfer and the Nature of Critical Thinking

We probably should have anticipated these results. Wanting students to be able to “analyze, synthesize, and evaluate” information sounds like a reasonable goal, but those terms mean different things in different disciplines. Literary criticism has its own internal logic, its norms for what constitutes good evidence and a valid argument. These norms differ from those found in mathematics, for example. Thus, our goals for student critical thinking must be domain-specific.

But wait. Surely there are some principles of thinking that apply across fields of study. Affirming the consequent is always wrong, straw-person arguments are always weak, and having a conflict of interest always makes your argument suspect. 14 There are indeed principles that carry across domains of study. The problem is that people who learn these broadly applicable principles in one situation often fail to apply them in a new situation.

The law of large numbers provides an example. It states that a large sample will probably be closer to a “true” estimate than a small sample—if you want to know whether a set of dice is loaded, you’re better off seeing the results of 20 throws rather than two throws. People readily understand this idea in the context of evaluating randomness, but a small sample doesn’t bother them when judging academic performance; if someone receives poor grades on two math tests, observers judge they are simply bad at math. 15

In another classic experiment, researchers administered a tricky problem: a malignant tumor could be treated with a particular ray, but the ray caused a lot of collateral damage to healthy tissue. How, subjects were asked, could the ray be used to destroy the tumor? Other subjects got the same problem, but first read a story describing a military situation analogous to the medical problem. Instead of rays attacking a tumor, rebels were to attack a fortress. The military story offered a perfect analogy to the medical problem, but despite reading it moments before, subjects still couldn’t solve the medical problem. Merely mentioning that the story might help solve the problem boosted solution rates to nearly 100 percent. Thus, using the analogy was not hard; the problem was thinking to use it in the first place. 16

These results offer a new perspective on critical thinking. The problem in transfer is not just that different domains have different norms for critical thinking. The problem is that previous critical thinking successes seem encapsulated in memory. We know that a student has understood an idea like the law of large numbers. But understanding it offers no guarantee that the student will recognize new situations in which that idea will be useful.

Critical Thinking as Problem Recognition

Happily, this difficulty in recognizing problems you’ve solved before disappears in the face of significant practice. If I solve a lot of problems in which the law of large numbers is relevant, I no longer focus on the particulars of the problem—that is, whether it seems to be about cars, or ratings of happiness, or savings bonds. I immediately see that the law of large numbers is relevant. 17 Lots of practice is OK if you’re not in a hurry, but is there a faster way to help students “just see” that they have solved a problem before?

One technique is problem comparison; show students two solved problems that have the same structure but appear to be about different things, and ask students to compare them. 18 In one experiment testing this method, business school students were asked to compare two stories, one involving international companies coping with a shipping problem, and the other concerning two college students planning a spring break trip. In each, a difficult negotiation problem was resolved through the use of a particular type of contract. Two weeks later, students were more likely to use the solution on a novel problem if they had contrasted the stories compared to other students who simply read them. 19 Richard Catrambone developed a different technique to address a slightly different transfer problem. He noted that in math and science classes, students often learned to solve standard problems via a series of fixed, lockstep procedures. That meant students were stumped when confronted with a problem requiring a slight revision of the steps, even if the goal of the steps was the same. For example, a student might learn a method for solving word problems involving work like “Nicola can paint a house in 14 hours, and Carole can do it in 8. How long would it take them to paint one house, working together?” A student who learns a sequence of steps to solve that sort of problem is often thrown by a small change—the homeowner had already painted one-fourth of the house before hiring Nicola and Carole.

Catrambone 20 showed that student knowledge will be more flexible if students are taught to label the substeps of the solution with the goal it serves. For example, work problems are typically solved by calculating how much of the job each worker can do in an hour. If, during learning, that step were labeled so students understood that that calculation was part of deriving the solution, they would know how to solve the problem when a fraction of the house is to be painted.

Open-Ended Problems and Knowledge

Students encounter standard problems that are best solved in a particular way, but many critical thinking situations are unique. There are no routine, reusable solutions for problems like designing a product or planning a strategy for a field hockey match. Nevertheless, critical thinking for open-ended problems is enabled by extensive stores of knowledge about the domain. 21

First, the recognition process described above (“oh, this is that sort of problem”) can still apply to subparts of a complex, open-ended problem. Complex critical thinking may entail multiple simpler solutions from memory that can be “snapped together” when solving complex problems. 22 For example, arithmetic is needed for calculating the best value among several vacation packages.

Second, knowledge impacts working memory. Working memory refers, colloquially, to the place in the mind where thinking happens—it’s where you hold information and manipulate it to carry out cognitive tasks. So, for example, if I said “How is a scarecrow like a blueberry?,” you would retrieve information about scarecrows (not alive, protect crops, found in fields, birds think they are alive) and blueberries (purple, used in pies, small, featured in Blueberries for Sal ) from your memory, and then you’d start comparing these features, looking for overlap. But working memory has limited space; if I added three more words, you’d struggle to keep all five and their associations in mind at once.

With experience, often-associated bits of knowledge clump together and thus take up less room in working memory. In chess, a king, a castle, and three pawns in a corner of the board relate to one another in the defensive position, so the expert will treat them as a single unit. An experienced dancer similarly chunks dance moves allowing him to think about more subtle aspects of movement, rather than crowding working memory with “what I’m to do next.”

Third, knowledge is sometimes necessary to deploy thinking strategies. As noted above, sometimes you have an effective thinking strategy in your memory (for example, apply the law of large numbers) but fail to see that it’s relevant. In other situations, the proper thinking is easily recognized. We can tell students that they should evaluate the logic of the author’s argument when they read an op-ed, and we can tell them the right method to use when conducting a scientific experiment. Students should have no trouble recognizing “Oh, this is that sort of problem,” and they may have committed to memory the right thinking strategy. They know what to do, but they may not be able to use the strategy without the right domain knowledge.

For example, principles of scientific reasoning seem to be content free: for example, “a control group should be identical to the experimental group, except for the treatment.” In practice, however, content knowledge is needed to use the principle. For example, in an experiment on learning, you’d want to be sure that the experimental and control groups were comparable, so you’d make sure that proportions of men and women in each group were the same. What characteristics besides sex should you be sure are equivalent in the experimental and control groups? Ability to concentrate? Intelligence? You can’t measure every characteristic of your subjects, so you’d focus on characteristics that you know are relevant to learning. But knowing which characteristics are “relevant to learning” means knowing the research literature in learning and memory.

Experimental evidence shows that an expert doesn’t think as well outside her area of expertise, even in a closely related domain. She’s still better than a novice, but her skills don’t transfer completely. For example, knowledge of medicine transfers poorly among subspecialties (neurologists do not diagnose cardiac cases well), 23 technical writers can’t write newspaper articles, 24 and even professional philosophers are swayed by irrelevant features of problems like question order or wording. 25

How to Teach Students to Think Critically

So what does all this mean? Is there really no such thing as a “critical thinking skill” if by “skill” we mean something generalizable? Maybe, but it’s hard to be sure. We do know that students who go to school longer score better on intelligence tests, and certainly we think of intelligence as all-purpose. 26 Still, it may be that schooling boosts a collection of fairly specific thinking skills. If it increases general thinking skills, researchers have been unable to identify them.

Although existing data favor the specific skills account, 27 researchers would still say it’s uncertain whether a good critical thinker is someone who has mastered lots of specific skills, or someone with a smaller set of yet-to-be-identified general skills. But educators aren’t researchers, and for educators, one fact ought to be salient. We’re not even sure the general skills exist, but we’re quite sure there’s no proven way to teach them directly. In contrast, we have a pretty good idea of how to teach students the more specific critical thinking skills. I suggest we do so. Here’s a four-step plan.

First, identify what’s meant by critical thinking in each domain. Be specific by focusing on tasks that tap skills, not skills themselves. What tasks showing critical thinking should a high school graduate be able to do in mathematics, history, and other subjects? For example, educators might decide that an important aspect of understanding history is the ability to source historical documents; that is, to interpret them in light of their source—who wrote it, for what purpose, and for what intended audience. Educators might decide that a key critical thinking skill for science is understanding the relationship between a theory and a hypothesis. These skills should be explicitly taught and practiced—there is evidence that simple exposure to this sort of work without explicit instruction is less effective. 28

Second, identify the domain content that students must know. We’ve seen that domain knowledge is a crucial driver of thinking skill. What knowledge is essential to the type of thinking you want your students to be able to do? For example, if students are to source documents, they need knowledge of the relevant source; in other words, knowing that they are reading a 1779 letter from General George Clinton written to George Washington with a request for supplies won’t mean much if they don’t have some background knowledge about the American Revolutionary War—that will enable them to make sense of what they read when they look up Clinton and his activities at the time.

The prospect of someone deciding which knowledge students ought to learn—and what they won’t learn—sometimes makes people uneasy because this decision depends on one’s goals for schooling, and goals depend on values. Selection of content is a critical way that values are expressed. 29 Making that choice will lead to uncomfortable tradeoffs. But not choosing is still making a choice. It’s choosing not to plan.

Third, educators must select the best sequence for students to learn the skills. It’s obvious that skills and knowledge build on one another in mathematics and history, and it’s equally true of other domains of skill and knowledge; we interpret new information in light of what we already know.

Fourth, educators must decide which skills should be revisited across years. Studies show that even if content is learned quite well over the course of half of a school year, about half will be forgotten in three years. 30 That doesn’t mean there’s no value in exposing students to content just once; most students will forget much, but they’ll remember something, and for some students, an interest may be kindled. But when considering skills we hope will stick with students for the long term, we should plan on at least three to five years of practice. 31

Some Practical Matters of Teaching Critical Thinking

I’ve outlined a broad, four-step plan. Let’s consider some of the pragmatic decisions educators face as they contemplate the teaching of critical thinking.

Is it all or none ? I’ve suggested that critical thinking be taught in the context of a comprehensive curriculum. Does that mean an individual teacher cannot do anything on his or her own? Is there just no point in trying if the cooperation of the entire school system is not assured?

Obviously that’s not the case; a teacher can still include critical thinking content in his or her courses and students will learn, but it’s quite likely they will learn more, and learn more quickly, if their learning is coordinated across years. It has long been recognized among psychologists that an important factor influencing learning, perhaps the most important factor, is what the student already knows. 32 Teaching will be more effective if the instructor is confident about what his or her students already know.

Student age : When should critical thinking instruction start? There’s not a firm, research-based answer to this question. Researchers interested in thinking skills like problem solving or evidence evaluation in young children (preschool through early elementary ages) have studied how children think in the absence of explicit instruction. They have not studied whether or how young children can be made to think more critically. Still, research over the last 30 years or so has led to an important conclusion: children are more capable than we thought.

The great developmental psychologist Jean Piaget proposed a highly influential theory that suggested children’s cognition moves through a series of four stages, characterized by more and more abstract thought, and better ability to take multiple perspectives. In stage theories, the basic architecture of thought is unchanged for long periods of time, and then rapidly reorganizes as the child moves from one developmental stage to another. 33 A key educational implication is that it’s at least pointless and possibly damaging to ask the child to do cognitive work that is appropriate for a later developmental stage. The last 30 years has shown that, contrary to Piaget’s theory, development is gradual, and does not change abruptly. It has also shown that what children can and cannot do varies depending on the content.

For example, in some circumstances, even toddlers can understand principles of conditional reasoning. For instance, conditional reasoning is required when the relationship of two things is contingent on a third thing. A child may understand that when she visits a friend’s house, she may get a treat like cake or cookies for a snack or she may not. But if her friend is celebrating a birthday, the relation between those two things (a visit and getting cake) becomes very consistent. Yet when conditional reasoning problems are framed in unfamiliar contexts, they confuse even adult physicians. Much depends on the content of the problem. 34

Thus, research tells us that including critical thinking in the schooling of young children is likely to be perfectly appropriate. It does not, however, provide guidance into what types of critical thinking skills to start with. That is a matter to take up with experienced educators, coordinating with colleagues who teach older children in the interests of making the curriculum seamless.

Types of students : Should everyone learn critical thinking skills? The question sounds like a setup, like an excuse for a resounding endorsement of critical thinking for all. But the truth is that, in many systems, less capable students are steered into less challenging coursework, with the hope that by reducing expectations, they will at least achieve “mastery of the basics.” These lower expectations often pervade entire schools that serve students from low-income families. 35

It is worth highlighting that access to challenging content and continuing to postsecondary education is, in nearly every country, associated with socioeconomic status. 36 Children from high socioeconomic status families also have more opportunities to learn at home. If school is the chief or only venue through which low socioeconomic status students are exposed to advanced vocabulary, rich content knowledge, and demands for high-level thinking, it is absolutely vital that those opportunities be enhanced, not reduced.

Assessment : Assessment of critical thinking is, needless to say, a challenge. One difficulty is expense. Claims to the contrary, multiple-choice items do not necessarily require critical thinking, even when items are carefully constructed and vetted, as on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). One researcher 37 administered items from the history NAEP for 12th-graders to college students who had done well on other standardized history exams. Students were asked to think aloud as they chose their answers, and the researchers observed little critical thinking, but a lot of “gaming” of the questions. Assessing critical thinking requires that students answer open-form questions, and that means humans must score the response, an expensive proposition.

On the bright side, the plan for teaching critical thinking that I’ve recommended makes some aspects of assessment more straightforward. If the skills that constitute “critical thinking” in, say, 10th-grade chemistry class are fully defined, then there is no question as to what content ought to appear on the assessment. The predictability ought to make teachers more confident that they can prepare their students for standardized assessments.

A s much as teaching students to think critically is a universal goal of schooling, one might be surprised that student difficulty in this area is such a common complaint. Educators are often frustrated that student thinking seems shallow. This review should offer insight into why that is. The way the mind works, shallow is what you get first. Deep, critical thinking is hard-won.

That means that designers and administrators of a program to improve critical thinking among students must take the long view, both in the time frame over which the program operates and especially in the speed with which one expects to see results. Patience will be a key ingredient in any program that succeeds.

Daniel T. Willingham is a professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Virginia. He is the author of When Can You Trust the Experts? How to Tell Good Science from Bad in Education and Why Don’t Students Like School? His most recent book is The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads . This article is adapted with permission from his report for the government of New South Wales, “How to Teach Critical Thinking.” Copyright 2019 by Willingham. Readers can pose questions to “Ask the Cognitive Scientist” by sending an email to [email protected] . Future columns will try to address readers’ questions. *For more on the research behind transfer of learning, see “If You Learn A, Will You Be Better Able to Learn B?” in the Spring 2020 issue of American Educator , available here . ( return to article )

1. D. T. Willingham, “Critical Thinking: Why Is It So Hard to Teach,” American Educator 31, no. 2 (Summer 2007): 8–19. 2. P. C. Abrami et al., “Instructional Interventions Affecting Critical Thinking Skills and Dispositions: A Stage 1 Meta-Analysis,” Review of Educational Research 78, no. 4 (2008): 1102–1134; and R. L. Bangert-Drowns and E. Bankert, “Meta-Analysis of Effects of Explicit Instruction for Critical Thinking,” in Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association (Boston: 1990), 56–79. 3. D. A. Bensley and R. A. Spero, “Improving Critical Thinking Skills and Metacognitive Monitoring through Direct Infusion,” Thinking Skills and Creativity 12 (2014): 55–68. 4. C. F. Lewis, “A Study in Formal Discipline,” The School Review 13, no. 4 (1905): 281–292. 5. E. L. Thorndike, “The Influence of First-Year Latin upon Ability to Read English,” School and Society 17 (1923): 165–168; and C. R. Broyler, E. L. Thorndike, and E. Woodward, “A Second Study of Mental Discipline in High School Studies,” Journal of Educational Psychology 18, no. 6 (1924): 377–404. 6. S. Papert, “Teaching Children to Be Mathematicians versus Teaching about Mathematics,” International Journal of Mathematical Education in Science and Technology 3, no. 3 (1972): 249–262; and S. Papert, Mindstorms (New York: Basic Books, 1980); see also D. H. Clements and D. F. Gullo, “Effects of Computer Programming on Young Children’s Cognition,” Journal of Educational Psychology 76, no. 6 (1984): 1051–1058; and M. C. Linn, “The Cognitive Consequences of Programming Instruction in Classrooms,” Educational Researcher 14, no. 5 (1985): 14–29. 7. Y.-K. C. Liao and G. W. Bright, “Effects of Computer Programming on Cognitive Outcomes: A Meta-Analysis,” Journal of Educational Computing Research 7, no. 3 (1991): 251–268. 8. R. Scherer, F. Siddiq, and B. S. Viveros, “The Cognitive Benefits of Learning Computer Programming: A Meta-Analysis of Transfer Effects,” Journal of Educational Psychology 111, no. 5 (2019): 764–792. 9. J. Pietschnig, M. Voracek, and A. K. Formann, “Mozart Effect-Schmozart Effect: A Meta-Analysis,” Intelligence 38, no. 3 (2010): 314–323. 10. G. Sala and F. Gobet, “When the Music’s Over: Does Music Skill Transfer to Children’s and Young Adolescents’ Cognitive and Academic Skills? A Meta-Analysis,” Educational Research Review 20 (2017): 55–67. 11. G. Sala and F. Gobet, “Do the Benefits of Chess Instruction Transfer to Academic and Cognitive Skills? A Meta-Analysis,” Educational Research Review 18 (2016): 46–57. 12. For example, A. Kozulin et al., “Cognitive Modifiability of Children with Developmental Disabilities: A Multicentre Study Using Feuerstein’s Instrumental Enrichment-Basic Program,” Research in Developmental Disabilities 31, no. 2 (2010): 551–559; D. Kuhn and A. Crowell, “Dialogic Argumentation as a Vehicle for Developing Young Adolescents’ Thinking,” Psychological Science 22, no. 4 (2011): 545–552; and A. Reznitskaya et al., “Examining Transfer Effects from Dialogic Discussions to New Tasks and Contexts,” Contemporary Educational Psychology 37, no. 4 (2012): 288–306. 13. R. Ritchart and D. N. Perkins, “Learning to Think: The Challenges of Teaching Thinking,” in The Cambridge Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning , ed. K. J. Holyoak and R. G. Morrison (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2005), 775–802. 14. R. H. Ennis, “Critical Thinking and the Curriculum,” in Thinking Skills Instruction: Concepts and Techniques , ed. M. Heiman and J. Slomianko (West Haven, CT: NEA Professional Library, 1987), 40–48. 15. C. Jepson, D. H. Krantz, and R. E. Nisbett, “Inductive Reasoning: Competence or Skill?,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 6, no. 3 (1983): 494–501. 16. M. Gick and K. Holyoak, “Analogical Problem Solving,” Cognitive Psychology 12, no. 3 (1980): 306–355; and M. Gick and K. Holyoak, “Schema Induction and Analogical Transfer,” Cognitive Psychology 15, no. 1 (1983): 1–38. 17. For example, Z. Chen and L. Mo, “Schema Induction in Problem Solving: A Multidimensional Analysis,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cognition 30, no. 3 (2004): 583–600. 18. K. J. Kurtz, O. Boukrina, and D. Gentner, “Comparison Promotes Learning and Transfer of Relational Categories,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cognition 39, no. 4 (2013): 1303–1310. 19. J. Loewenstein, L. Thompson, and D. Gentner, “Analogical Encoding Facilitates Knowledge Transfer in Negotiation,” Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 6, no. 4 (1999): 586–597. 20. R. Catrambone, “Aiding Subgoal Learning: Effects on Transfer,” Journal of Educational Psychology 87, no. 1 (1995): 5–17; R. Catrambone, “The Subgoal Learning Model: Creating Better Examples to Improve Transfer to Novel Problems,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 127, no. 4 (1998): 355–376; R. Catrambone and K. Holyoak, “Learning Subgoals and Methods for Solving Probability Problems,” Memory & Cognition 18, no. 6 (1990): 593–603; and L. E. Margulieux and R. Catrambone, “Improving Problem Solving with Subgoal Labels in Expository Text and Worked Examples,” Learning and Instruction 42 (2016): 58–71. 21. J. S. North et al., “Mechanisms Underlying Skills Anticipation and Recognition in a Dynamic and Temporally Constrained Domain,” Memory 19, no. 2 (2011): 155–168. 22. K. Koedinger, A. Corbett, and C. Perfetti, “The Knowledge-Learning-Instruction Framework: Bridging the Science-Practice Chasm to Enhance Robust Student Learning,” Cognitive Science 36, no. 5 (2012): 757–798; and N. A. Taatgen, “The Nature and Transfer of Cognitive Skills,” Psychological Review 120, no. 3 (2013): 439–471. 23. R. Rikers, H. Schmidt, and H. Boshuizen, “On the Constraints of Encapsulated Knowledge: Clinical Case Representations by Medical Experts and Subexperts,” Cognition and Instruction 20, no. 1 (2002): 27–45. 24. R. T. Kellogg, “Professional Writing Expertise,” in The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performances , ed. A. Ericsson et al. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2018). 25. E. Schwitzgebel and F. Cushman, “Philosophers’ Biased Judgments Persist Despite Training, Expertise, and Reflection,” Cognition 141 (2015): 127–137. 26. M. Carlsson et al., “The Effect of Schooling on Cognitive Skills,” Review of Economics and Statistics 97, no. 3 (2015): 533–547; S. Ritchie and E. Tucker-Drob, “How Much Does Education Improve Intelligence? A Meta-Analysis,” Psychological Science 29, no. 8 (2018): 1358–1369; and T. Strenze, “Intelligence and Socioeconomic Success: A Meta-Analytic Review of Longitudinal Research,” Intelligence 35, no. 5 (2007): 401–426. 27. S. Ritchie, T. C. Bates, and I. J. Deary, “Is Education Associated with Improvements in General Cognitive Ability, or in Specific Skills?,” Developmental Psychology 51, no. 5 (2015): 573–582. 28. Abrami et al., “Instructional Interventions”; D. F. Halpern, “Teaching Critical Thinking for Transfer across Domains: Disposition, Skills, Structure Training, and Metacognitive Monitoring,” American Psychologist 53, no. 4 (1998): 449–455; A. Heijltjes, T. Van Gog, and F. Paas, “Improving Students’ Critical Thinking: Empirical Support for Explicit Instructions Combined with Practice,” Applied Cognitive Psychology 28, no. 4 (2014): 518–530. 29. D. T. Willingham, When Can You Trust the Experts? How to Tell Good Science from Bad in Education (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2012). 30. A. Pawl et al., “What Do Seniors Remember from Freshman Physics?,” Physical Review Special Topics—Physics Education Research 8, no. 2 (2012): 020118. 31. H. P. Bahrick, “Semantic Memory Content in Permastore: Fifty Years of Memory for Spanish Learned in School,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 113, no. 1 (1984): 1–29; and H. P. Bahrick and L. K. Hall, “Lifetime Maintenance of High School Mathematics Content,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 120, no. 1 (1991): 20–33. 32. D. Ausubel, Educational Psychology: A Cognitive View (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1968). 33. J. Piaget, The Origins of Intelligence in Children (New York: International Universities Press, 1952). 34. D. T. Willingham, “What Is Developmentally Appropriate Practice?,” American Educator 32, no. 2 (2008): 34–39. 35. P. D. Parker et al., “A Multination Study of Socioeconomic Inequality in Expectations for Progression to Higher Education: The Role of Between-School Tracking and Ability Stratification,” American Educational Research Journal 53, no. 1 (2016): 6–32. 36. Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Education at a Glance: 2018: OECD Indicators (Paris: OECD Publishing, 2018). 37. M. D. Smith, “Cognitive Validity: Can Multi-Choice Items Tap Historical Thinking Processes?,” American Educational Research Journal 54 (2017): 1256–1287.

[Illustrations by James Yang]

• Apr 1, 2022

Why is critical thinking so hard?

…and how we can teach it.

Hello! Welcome to the 8th edition of Things in Education, the fortnightly newsletter through which we hope to share the latest in education research and developments in the form of accessible summaries and stories to help you in the classroom and at home.

Let’s be frank. Thinking critically is hard. It’s so hard that most adults struggle to think critically. Take the example of the millions who are convinced that world leaders and award-winning actors are actually power-hungry aliens, or that the COVID-19 vaccines contain microchips so that the government can track every second of our every day…

And so, education boards all over the world have made the teaching of critical thinking skills compulsory in school. But if learning how to think critically is hard, teaching it is a hundred times harder. After all, there is no set definition of critical thinking. And unlike the steps of long division, there is no set process to teach critical thinking either.

Though all is not lost. With some understanding of how the mind likes to think and what thinking critically really requires, we can begin to build these skills in ourselves and in our students. What better day to begin than today?

Surface Structure and Deep Structure

So let’s begin by exercising our own critical thinking skills.

In 1980, researchers Mary Gick and Keith Holyoke conducted an experiment. In this experiment, they gave some college students a story to read:

The students were asked to memorise this story. Then, they were asked to solve a problem:

Here’s the solution: Just like the army general broke up his soldiers into small groups to converge on the fortress at the same time, the doctor can send several low-intensity rays towards the tumour. These rays won’t destroy healthy tissue, but when they all converge on the tumour, their intensity will be high enough to destroy it.

In the experiment, only 20% of the students were able to solve the problem, in spite of memorising the first story. Why do you think most of them were not able to see the similarities in the structures of the two problems?

Here’s why: Our mind tends to prefer the surface structure of new information – the specific, concrete details and particulars. In this case, these concrete details were the fortress and the general and the roads in the first problem, and the tumour and the tissue and the rays in the second problem.

In order to think critically, we must also understand the deep structure of new information – the general underlying principle. In this case, the underlying principle was “the dispersal and regathering of strength” – of the soldiers and of the rays!

So what does this look like in the classroom? Let’s take an example from English. Ask your middle- or high-school students the following question: Why will Grade 7 students not enjoy the story of the lion and the mouse as much as a mystery set on Mars?

Students will most likely begin by thinking about the surface structures of the stories: Mars is more exciting; lions and mice cannot talk; and so on. However, students have not thought critically in giving these responses – they have not gone down to the deep structure.

Thinking about the deep structure in this case begins with thinking about the genres of the two stories – one is a fable, and the other is science fiction. Fables are written keeping the developmental stage of young children in mind; science fiction is for teenagers and young adults. Fables have simple storylines; the plotline of science fiction is much more complicated. Fables present everything as black and white, good and bad; while science fiction usually poses moral dilemmas that teenagers are beginning to grapple with… The deep structures of stories give us a much more critical understanding of the question posed!

Background Knowledge

Here’s another task for you: Do you agree with the following tweet by Web3 Coin? Support your opinion with 2 pieces of evidence.

Here were my thoughts when I first read this: 543 retweets? And 525 people liked this tweet? I don’t even know what it means… What is web3 in the first place? Is web3 something we can “have”? Huh? What does it have to do with crypto? I’m not intelligent enough for this…

Does this mean that I have no critical thinking skills? Absolutely not. What it does mean is that background knowledge is the first and most important requirement for critical thinking. I can’t think critically about something I don’t know enough about. A doctor can think critically about the oxygen requirements of her patients, but that does not mean that she can think critically about the construction of an oxygen cylinder. A lawyer can think critically about the legal nuances of a mental harassment lawsuit, but that does not mean that she can think critically about the medical requirements of mental health. Background knowledge is the foundation of critical thinking.

So what does this mean for the classroom? One of the best ways to build students’ background knowledge is to adopt a multi-disciplinary approach. A multi-disciplinary approach analyses a concept or a topic through the lens of various disciplines. For example:

Such an approach would require teachers of different subjects to plan well in advance and collaborate on the progress of the curriculum. At the same time, individual subject teachers can also implement the multi-disciplinary approach in simpler ways by incorporating one other subject into their curriculum, like asking students to use their knowledge of language to break down and understand new scientific terms, or having students research the history of the place in which a famous author lived. Slowly but surely, teachers will see students begin to think critically in these subjects.

There is no set definition of critical thinking because different areas of life and different problems require different types of thinking skills. “Critical thinking skills” is an umbrella term for many different skills. What we do know, however, is that going beyond the surface structure of information and to the deep structure as well as building background knowledge are important steps towards developing critical thinking skills. Let’s start there!

Useful Links:

Multi-disciplinary learning : In this blog, we explain how multi-disciplinary learning leads to deep understanding by increasing and strengthening connections in the brain.

Critical thinking : In this periodical, cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham explains why critical thinking is so hard to teach.

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Edition: 1.8

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Why Critical Thinking Is Important (& How to Improve It)

Last updated May 1, 2023. Edited and medically reviewed by Patrick Alban, DC . Written by Deane Alban .

By improving the quality of your thoughts and your decisions, better critical thinking skills can bring about a big positive change in your life. Learn how.

The quality of your life largely depends on the quality of the decisions you make.

Amazingly, the average person makes roughly 35,000 conscious decisions every day! 

Imagine how much better your life would be if there were a way to make better decisions, day in and day out?

Well, there is and you do it by boosting a skill called critical thinking .

Learning to master critical thinking can have a profoundly positive impact on nearly every aspect of your life.

What Exactly Is Critical Thinking?

The first documented account of critical thinking is the teachings of Socrates as recorded by Plato. 

Over time, the definition of critical thinking has evolved.

Most definitions of critical thinking are fairly complex and best understood by philosophy majors or psychologists.

For example, the Foundation for Critical Thinking , a nonprofit think tank, offers this definition:

“Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action.”

If that makes your head spin, here are some definitions that you may relate to more easily.

Critical thinking is “reasonable, reflective thinking that is focused on deciding what to believe or do.”

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Or, a catchy way of defining critical thinking is “deciding what’s true and what you should do.”

But my favorite uber-simple definition is that critical thinking is simply “thinking about thinking.”

6 Major Benefits of Good Critical Thinking Skills

Whether or not you think critically can make the difference between success and failure in just about every area of your life.

Our human brains are imperfect and prone to irrationality, distortions, prejudices, and cognitive biases .

Cognitive biases are systematic patterns of irrational thinking.

While the number of cognitive biases varies depending on the source, Wikipedia, for example, lists nearly 200 of them ! 

Some of the most well-known cognitive biases include:

• catastrophic thinking
• confirmation bias
• fear of missing out (FOMO)

Critical thinking will help you move past the limitations of irrational thinking.

Here are some of the most important ways critical thinking can impact your life.

1. Critical Thinking Is a Key to Career Success

There are many professions where critical thinking is an absolute must.

Lawyers, analysts, accountants, doctors, engineers, reporters, and scientists of all kinds must apply critical thinking frequently.

But critical thinking is a skill set that is becoming increasingly valuable in a growing number of professions.

Critical thinking can help you in any profession where you must:

• analyze information
• systematically solve problems
• generate innovative solutions
• plan strategically
• think creatively
• present your work or ideas to others in a way that can be readily understood

And, as we enter the fourth industrial revolution , critical thinking has become one of the most sought-after skills.

According to the World Economic Forum , critical thinking and complex problem-solving are the two top in-demand skills that employers look for. 

Critical thinking is considered a soft or enterprise skill — a core attribute required to succeed in the workplace . 

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• Provides the building blocks to create new brain cells and brain chemicals
• Helps increase resilience to stress to avoid mental burnout
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According to The University of Arizona, other soft skills include : 

• interpersonal skills
• communication skills
• digital literacy

Critical thinking can help you develop the rest of these soft skills.

Developing your critical thinking can help you land a job since many employers will ask you interview questions or even give you a test to determine how well you can think critically.

It can also help you continually succeed in your career, since being a critical thinker is a powerful predictor of long-term success.

2. Critical Thinkers Make Better Decisions

Every day you make thousands of decisions.

Most of them are made by your subconscious , are not very important, and don’t require much thought, such as what to wear or what to have for lunch. 

But the most important decisions you make can be hard and require a lot of thought, such as when or if you should change jobs, relocate to a new city, buy a house, get married, or have kids.

At work, you may have to make decisions that can alter the course of your career or the lives of others.

Critical thinking helps you cope with everyday problems as they arise.

It promotes independent thinking and strengthens your inner “BS detector.”

It helps you make sense of the glut of data and information available, making you a smarter consumer who is less likely to fall for advertising hype, peer pressure, or scams.

3. Critical Thinking Can Make You Happier

Knowing and understanding yourself is an underappreciated path to happiness. 

We’ve already shown how your quality of life largely depends on the quality of your decisions, but equally as important is the quality of your thoughts.

Critical thinking is an excellent tool to help you better understand yourself and to learn to master your thoughts.

You can use critical thinking to free yourself from cognitive biases, negative thinking , and limiting beliefs that are holding you back in any area of your life.

Critical thinking can help you assess your strengths and weaknesses so that you know what you have to offer others and where you could use improvement.

Critical thinking will enable you to better express your thoughts, ideas, and beliefs.

Better communication helps others to understand you better, resulting in less frustration for both of you.

Critical thinking fosters creativity and out-of-the-box thinking that can be applied to any area of your life.

It gives you a process you can rely on, making decisions less stressful.

4. Critical Thinking Ensures That Your Opinions Are Well-Informed

We have access to more information than ever before .

Astoundingly, more data has been created in the past two years than in the entire previous history of mankind. 

Critical thinking can help you sort through the noise.

American politician, sociologist, and diplomat Daniel Patrick Moynihan once remarked , “You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.” 

Critical thinking ensures your opinions are well-informed and based on the best available facts.

You’ll get a boost in confidence when you see that those around you trust your well-considered opinions.

5. Critical Thinking Improves Relationships

You might be concerned that critical thinking will turn you into a Spock-like character who is not very good at relationships.

But, in fact, the opposite is true.

Employing critical thinking makes you more open-minded and better able to understand others’ points of view.

Critical thinkers are more empathetic and in a better position to get along with different kinds of people.

Critical thinking keeps you from jumping to conclusions.

You can be counted on to be the voice of reason when arguments get heated.

You’ll be better able to detect when others:

• are being disingenuous
• don’t have your best interests at heart
• try to take advantage of or manipulate you

6. Critical Thinking Makes You a Better, More Informed Citizen

“An educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people.”

This quote has been incorrectly attributed to Thomas Jefferson , but regardless of the source, these words of wisdom are more relevant than ever. 

Critical thinkers are able to see both sides of any issue and are more likely to generate bipartisan solutions.

They are less likely to be swayed by propaganda or get swept up in mass hysteria.

They are in a better position to spot fake news when they see it.

5 Steps to Improve Your Critical Thinking Skills

Some people already have well-developed critical thinking skills.

These people are analytical, inquisitive, and open to new ideas.

And, even though they are confident in their own opinions, they seek the truth, even if it proves their existing ideas to be wrong.

They are able to connect the dots between ideas and detect inconsistencies in others’ thinking.

But regardless of the state of your critical thinking skills today, it’s a skill set you can develop.

While there are many techniques for thinking rationally, here’s a classic 5-step critical thinking process . 

How to Improve Your Critical Thinking Skills

Clearly define your question or problem.

This step is so important that Albert Einstein famously quipped:

“If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.”

Gather Information to Help You Weigh the Options

Consider only the most useful and reliable information from the most reputable sources.

Disregard the rest.

Apply the Information and Ask Critical Questions

Scrutinize all information carefully with a skeptic’s eye.

Not sure what questions to ask?

You can’t go wrong starting with the “5 Ws” that any good investigator asks: Who? What? Where? When? Why?

Then finish by asking “How?”

You’ll find more thought-provoking questions on this Critical Thinking Skills Cheatsheet .

Consider the Implications

Look for potential unintended consequences.

Do a thought experiment about how your solution could play out in both the short term and the long run.

Explore the Full Spectrum of Viewpoints

Examine why others are drawn to differing points of view.

This will help you objectively evaluate your own viewpoint.

You may find critical thinkers who take an opposing view and this can help you find gaps in your own logic.

Watch the Video

This TED-Ed video on YouTube elaborates on the five steps to improve your critical thinking.

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• Increase your capacity to think critically, solve problems, and make decisions.

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Critical Thinking: Why Is It So Hard to Teach?

Learning critical thinking skills can only take a student so far. Critical thinking depends on knowing relevant content very well and thinking about it, repeatedly. Here are five strategies, consistent with the research, to help bring critical thinking into the everyday classroom.

On this page:

Why is thinking critically so hard, thinking tends to focus on a problem's "surface structure", with deep knowledge, thinking can penetrate beyond surface structure, looking for a deep structure helps, but it only takes you so far, is thinking like a scientist easier, why scientific thinking depends on scientific knowledge.

Virtually everyone would agree that a primary, yet insufficiently met, goal of schooling is to enable students to think critically. In layperson’s terms, critical thinking consists of seeing both sides of an issue, being open to new evidence that disconfirms your ideas, reasoning dispassionately, demanding that claims be backed by evidence, deducing and inferring conclusions from available facts, solving problems, and so forth. Then too, there are specific types of critical thinking that are characteristic of different subject matter: That’s what we mean when we refer to “thinking like a scientist” or “thinking like a historian.”

This proper and commonsensical goal has very often been translated into calls to teach “critical thinking skills” and “higher-order thinking skills” and into generic calls for teaching students to make better judgments, reason more logically, and so forth. In a recent survey of human resource officials 1 and in testimony delivered just a few months ago before the Senate Finance Committee, 2 business leaders have repeatedly exhorted schools to do a better job of teaching students to think critically. And they are not alone. Organizations and initiatives involved in education reform, such as the National Center on Education and the Economy, the American Diploma Project, and the Aspen Institute, have pointed out the need for students to think and/or reason critically. The College Board recently revamped the SAT to better assess students’ critical thinking and ACT, Inc. offers a test of critical thinking for college students.

These calls are not new. In 1983, A Nation At Risk , a report by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, found that many 17-year-olds did not possess the “ ‘higher-order’ intellectual skills” this country needed. It claimed that nearly 40 percent could not draw inferences from written material and only onefifth could write a persuasive essay.

Following the release of A Nation At Risk , programs designed to teach students to think critically across the curriculum became extremely popular. By 1990, most states had initiatives designed to encourage educators to teach critical thinking, and one of the most widely used programs, Tactics for Thinking, sold 70,000 teacher guides. 3 But, for reasons I’ll explain, the programs were not very effective — and today we still lament students’ lack of critical thinking.

After more than 20 years of lamentation, exhortation, and little improvement, maybe it’s time to ask a fundamental question: Can critical thinking actually be taught? Decades of cognitive research point to a disappointing answer: not really. People who have sought to teach critical thinking have assumed that it is a skill, like riding a bicycle, and that, like other skills, once you learn it, you can apply it in any situation. Research from cognitive science shows that thinking is not that sort of skill. The processes of thinking are intertwined with the content of thought (that is, domain knowledge). Thus, if you remind a student to “look at an issue from multiple perspectives” often enough, he will learn that he ought to do so, but if he doesn’t know much about an issue, he can’t think about it from multiple perspectives. You can teach students maxims about how they ought to think, but without background knowledge and practice, they probably will not be able to implement the advice they memorize. Just as it makes no sense to try to teach factual content without giving students opportunities to practice using it, it also makes no sense to try to teach critical thinking devoid of factual content.

In this article, I will describe the nature of critical thinking, explain why it is so hard to do and to teach, and explore how students acquire a specific type of critical thinking: thinking scientifically. Along the way, we’ll see that critical thinking is not a set of skills that can be deployed at any time, in any context. It is a type of thought that even 3-year-olds can engage in — and even trained scientists can fail in. And it is very much dependent on domain knowledge and practice.

Educators have long noted that school attendance and even academic success are no guarantee that a student will graduate an effective thinker in all situations. There is an odd tendency for rigorous thinking to cling to particular examples or types of problems. Thus, a student may have learned to estimate the answer to a math problem before beginning calculations as a way of checking the accuracy of his answer, but in the chemistry lab, the same student calculates the components of a compound without noticing that his estimates sum to more than 100%. And a student who has learned to thoughtfully discuss the causes of the American Revolution from both the British and American perspectives doesn’t even think to question how the Germans viewed World War II. Why are students able to think critically in one situation, but not in another? The brief answer is: Thought processes are intertwined with what is being thought about. Let’s explore this in depth by looking at a particular kind of critical thinking that has been studied extensively: problem solving.

Imagine a seventh-grade math class immersed in word problems. How is it that students will be able to answer one problem, but not the next, even though mathematically both word problems are the same, that is, they rely on the same mathematical knowledge? Typically, the students are focusing on the scenario that the word problem describes (its surface structure) instead of on the mathematics required to solve it (its deep structure). So even though students have been taught how to solve a particular type of word problem, when the teacher or textbook changes the scenario, students still struggle to apply the solution because they don’t recognize that the problems are mathematically the same.

To understand why the surface structure of a problem is so distracting and, as a result, why it’s so hard to apply familiar solutions to problems that appear new, let’s first consider how you understand what’s being asked when you are given a problem. Anything you hear or read is automatically interpreted in light of what you already know about similar subjects. For example, suppose you read these two sentences: “After years of pressure from the film and television industry, the President has filed a formal complaint with China over what U.S. firms say is copyright infringement. These firms assert that the Chinese government sets stringent trade restrictions for U.S. entertainment products, even as it turns a blind eye to Chinese companies that copy American movies and television shows and sell them on the black market.” Background knowledge not only allows you to comprehend the sentences, it also has a powerful effect as you continue to read because it narrows the interpretations of new text that you will entertain. For example, if you later read the word “Bush,” it would not make you think of a small shrub, nor would you wonder whether it referred to the former President Bush, the rock band, or a term for rural hinterlands. If you read “piracy,” you would not think of eye-patched swabbies shouting “shiver me timbers!” The cognitive system gambles that incoming information will be related to what you’ve just been thinking about. Thus, it significantly narrows the scope of possible interpretations of words, sentences, and ideas. The benefit is that comprehension proceeds faster and more smoothly; the cost is that the deep structure of a problem is harder to recognize.

The narrowing of ideas that occurs while you read (or listen) means that you tend to focus on the surface structure, rather than on the underlying structure of the problem. For example, in one experiment, 4 subjects saw a problem like this one:

Members of the West High School Band were hard at work practicing for the annual Homecoming Parade. First they tried marching in rows of 12, but Andrew was left by himself to bring up the rear. Then the director told the band members to march in columns of eight, but Andrew was still left to march alone. Even when the band marched in rows of three, Andrew was left out. Finally, in exasperation, Andrew told the band director that they should march in rows of five in order to have all the rows filled. He was right. Given that there were at least 45 musicians on the field but fewer than 200 musicians, how many students were there in the West High School Band?

Earlier in the experiment, subjects had read four problems along with detailed explanations of how to solve each one, ostensibly to rate them for the clarity of the writing. One of the four problems concerned the number of vegetables to buy for a garden, and it relied on the same type of solution necessary for the band problem-calculation of the least common multiple. Yet, few subjects — just 19 percent — saw that the band problem was similar and that they could use the garden problem solution. Why?

When a student reads a word problem, her mind interprets the problem in light of her prior knowledge, as happened when you read the two sentences about copyrights and China. The difficulty is that the knowledge that seems relevant relates to the surface structure — in this problem, the reader dredges up knowledge about bands, high school, musicians, and so forth. The student is unlikely to read the problem and think of it in terms of its deep structure — using the least common multiple. The surface structure of the problem is overt, but the deep structure of the problem is not. Thus, people fail to use the first problem to help them solve the second: In their minds, the first was about vegetables in a garden and the second was about rows of band marchers.

If knowledge of how to solve a problem never transferred to problems with new surface structures, schooling would be inefficient or even futile — but of course, such transfer does occur. When and why is complex, 5 but two factors are especially relevant for educators: familiarity with a problem’s deep structure and the knowledge that one should look for a deep structure. I’ll address each in turn. When one is very familiar with a problem’s deep structure, knowledge about how to solve it transfers well. That familiarity can come from long-term, repeated experience with one problem, or with various manifestations of one type of problem (i.e., many problems that have different surface structures, but the same deep structure). After repeated exposure to either or both, the subject simply perceives the deep structure as part of the problem description. Here’s an example:

A treasure hunter is going to explore a cave up on a hill near a beach. He suspected there might be many paths inside the cave so he was afraid he might get lost. Obviously, he did not have a map of the cave; all he had with him were some common items such as a flashlight and a bag. What could he do to make sure he did not get lost trying to get back out of the cave later?

The solution is to carry some sand with you in the bag, and leave a trail as you go, so you can trace your path back when you’re ready to leave the cave. About 75% of American college students thought of this solution — but only 25% of Chinese students solved it. 6 The experimenters suggested that Americans solved it because most grew up hearing the story of Hansel and Gretel which includes the idea of leaving a trail as you travel to an unknown place in order to find your way back. The experimenters also gave subjects another puzzle based on a common Chinese folk tale, and the percentage of solvers from each culture reversed. www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/index.htm”>Read the puzzle based on the Chinese folk tale, and the tale itself.

It takes a good deal of practice with a problem type before students know it well enough to immediately recognize its deep structure, irrespective of the surface structure, as Americans did for the Hansel and Gretel problem. American subjects didn’t think of the problem in terms of sand, caves, and treasure; they thought of it in terms of finding something with which to leave a trail. The deep structure of the problem is so well represented in their memory, that they immediately saw that structure when they read the problem.

Now let’s turn to the second factor that aids in transfer despite distracting differences in surface structure — knowing to look for a deep structure. Consider what would happen if I said to a student working on the band problem, “this one is similar to the garden problem.” The student would understand that the problems must share a deep structure and would try to figure out what it is. Students can do something similar without the hint. A student might think “I’m seeing this problem in a math class, so there must be a math formula that will solve this problem.” Then he could scan his memory (or textbook) for candidates, and see if one of them helps. This is an example of what psychologists call metacognition, or regulating one’s thoughts. In the introduction, I mentioned that you can teach students maxims about how they ought to think. Cognitive scientists refer to these maxims as metacognitive strategies. They are little chunks of knowledge — like “look for a problem’s deep structure” or “consider both sides of an issue” — that students can learn and then use to steer their thoughts in more productive directions.

Helping students become better at regulating their thoughts was one of the goals of the critical thinking programs that were popular 20 years ago. These programs are not very effective. Their modest benefit is likely due to teaching students to effectively use metacognitive strategies. Students learn to avoid biases that most of us are prey to when we think, such as settling on the first conclusion that seems reasonable, only seeking evidence that confirms one’s beliefs, ignoring countervailing evidence, overconfidence, and others. 7 Thus, a student who has been encouraged many times to see both sides of an issue, for example, is probably more likely to spontaneously think “I should look at both sides of this issue” when working on a problem.

Unfortunately, metacognitive strategies can only take you so far. Although they suggest what you ought to do, they don’t provide the knowledge necessary to implement the strategy. For example, when experimenters told subjects working on the band problem that it was similar to the garden problem, more subjects solved the problem (35% compared to 19% without the hint), but most subjects, even when told what to do, weren’t able to do it. Likewise, you may know that you ought not accept the first reasonable-sounding solution to a problem, but that doesn’t mean you know how to come up with alterative solutions or weigh how reasonable each one is. That requires domain knowledge and practice in putting that knowledge to work.

Since critical thinking relies so heavily on domain knowledge, educators may wonder if thinking critically in a particular domain is easier to learn. The quick answer is yes, it’s a little easier. To understand why, let’s focus on one domain, science, and examine the development of scientific thinking.

Teaching science has been the focus of intensive study for decades, and the research can be usefully categorized into two strands. The first examines how children acquire scientific concepts; for example, how they come to forgo naive conceptions of motion and replace them with an understanding of physics. The second strand is what we would call thinking scientifically, that is, the mental procedures by which science is conducted: developing a model, deriving a hypothesis from the model, designing an experiment to test the hypothesis, gathering data from the experiment, interpreting the data in light of the model, and so forth.† Most researchers believe that scientific thinking is really a subset of reasoning that is not different in kind from other types of reasoning that children and adults do. 8 What makes it scientific thinking is knowing when to engage in such reasoning, and having accumulated enough relevant knowledge and spent enough time practicing to do so.

Recognizing when to engage in scientific reasoning is so important because the evidence shows that being able to reason is not enough; children and adults use and fail to use the proper reasoning processes on problems that seem similar. For example, consider a type of reasoning about cause and effect that is very important in science: conditional probabilities. If two things go together, it’s possible that one causes the other. Suppose you start a new medicine and notice that you seem to be getting headaches more often than usual. You would infer that the medication influenced your chances of getting a headache. But it could also be that the medication increases your chances of getting a headache only in certain circumstances or conditions. In conditional probability, the relationship between two things (e.g., medication and headaches) is dependent on a third factor. For example, the medication might increase the probability of a headache only when you’ve had a cup of coffee. The relationship of the medication and headaches is conditional on the presence of coffee.

Understanding and using conditional probabilities is essential to scientific thinking because it is so important in reasoning about what causes what. But people’s success in thinking this way depends on the particulars of how the question is presented. Studies show that adults sometimes use conditional probabilities successfully, 9 but fail to do so with many problems that call for it. 10 Even trained scientists are open to pitfalls in reasoning about conditional probabilities (as well as other types of reasoning). Physicians are known to discount or misinterpret new patient data that conflict with a diagnosis they have in mind, 11 and Ph.D.- level scientists are prey to faulty reasoning when faced with a problem embedded in an unfamiliar context. 12

And yet, young children are sometimes able to reason about conditional probabilities. In one experiment, 13 the researchers showed 3-year-olds a box and told them it was a “blicket detector” that would play music if a blicket were placed on top. The child then saw one of the two sequences shown below in which blocks are placed on the blicket detector. At the end of the sequence, the child was asked whether each block was a blicket. In other words, the child was to use conditional reasoning to infer which block caused the music to play.

Note that the relationship between each individual block (yellow cube and blue cylinder) and the music is the same in sequences 1 and 2. In either sequence, the child sees the yellow cube associated with music three times, and the blue cylinder associated with the absence of music once and the presence of music twice. What differs between the first and second sequence is the relationship between the blue and yellow blocks, and therefore, the conditional probability of each block being a blicket. Three-year-olds understood the importance of conditional probabilities.For sequence 1, they said the yellow cube was a blicket, but the blue cylinder was not; for sequence 2, they chose equally between the two blocks.

This body of studies has been summarized simply: Children are not as dumb as you might think, and adults (even trained scientists) are not as smart as you might think.What’s going on? One issue is that the common conception of critical thinking or scientific thinking (or historical thinking) as a set of skills is not accurate. Critical thinking does not have certain characteristics normally associated with skills — in particular, being able to use that skill at any time. If I told you that I learned to read music, for example, you would expect, correctly, that I could use my new skill (i.e., read music) whenever I wanted. But critical thinking is very different. As we saw in the discussion of conditional probabilities, people can engage in some types of critical thinking without training, but even with extensive training, they will sometimes fail to think critically. This understanding that critical thinking is not a skill is vital.‡ It tells us that teaching students to think critically probably lies in small part in showing them new ways of thinking, and in large part in enabling them to deploy the right type of thinking at the right time.

Returning to our focus on science, we’re ready to address a key question: Can students be taught when to engage in scientific thinking? Sort of. It is easier than trying to teach general critical thinking, but not as easy as we would like. Recall that when we were discussing problem solving, we found that students can learn metacognitive strategies that help them look past the surface structure of a problem and identify its deep structure, thereby getting them a step closer to figuring out a solution. Essentially the same thing can happen with scientific thinking. Students can learn certain metacognitive strategies that will cue them to think scientifically. But, as with problem solving, the metacognitive strategies only tell the students what they should do — they do not provide the knowledge that students need to actually do it. The good news is that within a content area like science, students have more context cues to help them figure out which metacognitive strategy to use, and teachers have a clearer idea of what domain knowledge they must teach to enable students to do what the strategy calls for.

For example, two researchers 14 taught second-, third-, and fourth-graders the scientific concept behind controlling variables; that is, of keeping everything in two comparison conditions the same, except for the one variable that is the focus of investigation. The experimenters gave explicit instruction about this strategy for conducting experiments and then had students practice with a set of materials (e.g., springs) to answer a specific question (e.g., which of these factors determine how far a spring will stretch: length, coil diameter, wire diameter, or weight?). The experimenters found that students not only understood the concept of controlling variables, they were able to apply it seven months later with different materials and a different experimenter, although the older children showed more robust transfer than the younger children. In this case, the students recognized that they were designing an experiment and that cued them to recall the metacognitive strategy, “When I design experiments, I should try to control variables.” Of course, succeeding in controlling all of the relevant variables is another matter-that depends on knowing which variables may matter and how they could vary.

Experts in teaching science recommend that scientific reasoning be taught in the context of rich subject matter knowledge. A committee of prominent science educators brought together by the National Research Council put it plainly: “Teaching content alone is not likely to lead to proficiency in science, nor is engaging in inquiry experiences devoid of meaningful science content.”

The committee drew this conclusion based on evidence that background knowledge is necessary to engage in scientific thinking. For example, knowing that one needs a control group in an experiment is important. Like having two comparison conditions, having a control group in addition to an experimental group helps you focus on the variable you want to study. But knowing that you need a control group is not the same as being able to create one. Since it’s not always possible to have two groups that are exactly alike, knowing which factors can vary between groups and which must not vary is one example of necessary background knowledge. In experiments measuring how quickly subjects can respond, for example, control groups must be matched for age, because age affects response speed, but they need not be perfectly matched for gender.

More formal experimental work verifies that background knowledge is necessary to reason scientifically. For example, consider devising a research hypothesis. One could generate multiple hypotheses for any given situation. Suppose you know that car A gets better gas mileage than car B and you’d like to know why. There are many differences between the cars, so which will you investigate first? Engine size? Tire pressure? A key determinant of the hypothesis you select is plausibility. You won’t choose to investigate a difference between cars A and B that you think is unlikely to contribute to gas mileage (e.g., paint color), but if someone provides a reason to make this factor more plausible (e.g., the way your teenage son’s driving habits changed after he painted his car red), you are more likely to say that this now-plausible factor should be investigated. 16 One’s judgment about the plausibility of a factor being important is based on one’s knowledge of the domain.

Other data indicate that familiarity with the domain makes it easier to juggle different factors simultaneously, which in turn allows you to construct experiments that simultaneously control for more factors. For example, in one experiment, 17 eighth-graders completed two tasks. In one, they were to manipulate conditions in a computer simulation to keep imaginary creatures alive. In the other, they were told that they had been hired by a swimming pool company to evaluate how the surface area of swimming pools was related to the cooling rate of its water. Students were more adept at designing experiments for the first task than the second, which the researchers interpreted as being due to students’ familiarity with the relevant variables. Students are used to thinking about factors that might influence creatures’ health (e.g., food, predators), but have less experience working with factors that might influence water temperature (e.g., volume, surface area). Hence, it is not the case that “controlling variables in an experiment” is a pure process that is not affected by subjects’ knowledge of those variables.

Prior knowledge and beliefs not only influence which hypotheses one chooses to test, they influence how one interprets data from an experiment. In one experiment, 18 undergraduates were evaluated for their knowledge of electrical circuits. Then they participated in three weekly, 1.5-hour sessions during which they designed and conducted experiments using a computer simulation of circuitry, with the goal of learning how circuitry works. The results showed a strong relationship between subjects’ initial knowledge and how much subjects learned in future sessions, in part due to how the subjects interpreted the data from the experiments they had conducted. Subjects who started with more and better integrated knowledge planned more informative experiments and made better use of experimental outcomes.

Other studies have found similar results, and have found that anomalous, or unexpected, outcomes may be particularly important in creating new knowledge-and particularly dependent upon prior knowledge. 19 Data that seem odd because they don’t fit one’s mental model of the phenomenon under investigation are highly informative. They tell you that your understanding is incomplete, and they guide the development of new hypotheses. But you could only recognize the outcome of an experiment as anomalous if you had some expectation of how it would turn out. And that expectation would be based on domain knowledge, as would your ability to create a new hypothesis that takes the anomalous outcome into account.

The idea that scientific thinking must be taught hand in hand with scientific content is further supported by research on scientific problem solving; that is, when students calculate an answer to a textbook-like problem, rather than design their own experiment. A meta-analysis 20 of 40 experiments investigating methods for teaching scientific problem solving showed that effective approaches were those that focused on building complex, integrated knowledge bases as part of problem solving, for example by including exercises like concept mapping. Ineffective approaches focused exclusively on the strategies to be used in problem solving while ignoring the knowledge necessary for the solution.

What do all these studies boil down to? First, critical thinking (as well as scientific thinking and other domain-based thinking) is not a skill. There is not a set of critical thinking skills that can be acquired and deployed regardless of context. Second, there are metacognitive strategies that, once learned, make critical thinking more likely. Third, the ability to think critically (to actually do what the metacognitive strategies call for) depends on domain knowledge and practice. For teachers, the situation is not hopeless, but no one should underestimate the difficulty of teaching students to think critically.

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Critical Thinking Why Is It So Hard to Teach?

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August 11, 2022

Why Thinking Hard Wears You Out

Concentrating for long periods builds up chemicals that disrupt brain functioning.

By Diana Kwon

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A workday filled with a string of mentally demanding tasks can leave you feeling drained. After long hours of mentally tracking one thought to the next, you’re probably more likely to choose a relaxing evening of streaming TV shows than to tackle a tough task on your to-do list or to make time on a creative pursuit. A new study provides a biological explanation for this familiar phenomenon: thinking hard leads to a buildup of chemicals that may disrupt the functioning of the brain.

For some time, scientists have struggled to find an explanation for why our mental resources get depleted. Researchers have hypothesized that long periods of strenuous mental effort lead to a depletion of glucose and other key resources that supply the energy-hungry brain. Early experiments in the 2000s supported this notion—reporting that people experienced a reduction in blood glucose after a cognitively demanding task and that consuming a sugar drink could boost performance . But subsequent work failed to reproduce those findings. “If you look at all of the studies together, there has been, on average, no effect,” says Antonius Wiehler , a cognitive neuroscientist at Pitie-Salpetriere Hospital in France.

In a previous study published in 2016, Wiehler’s Pitie-Salpetriere colleague Mathias Pessiglione and his team demonstrated that long periods of mentally effortful tasks made people more likely to choose immediate gratification over waiting for a bigger reward much later ($40 now versus $50 in two weeks, for example). This behavioral change was accompanied by a decrease in brain activity in the lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC), an area involved in cognitive processes such as decision-making. The result left the team with the question of what was causing this change in brain activity.

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To probe that question further in the new study , published in Current Biology on August 11, Pessiglione, Wiehler and their colleagues recruited 40 volunteers to follow up on the earlier work. Participants had to spend around six and a half hours at the lab—the approximate equivalent of a full workday—performing repetitive but mentally challenging tasks. Among them was the “N-back” task, which asked individuals to recall a letter that appeared on a screen “N” number of trials before. The subjects were split into two groups: one was assigned a difficult version of these tasks, while the other was given a simpler version. Although both groups reported feeling similar levels of exhaustion after the daylong experiment, only those who had been given the harder task were more likely to choose to take home an immediate reward rather than wait for a larger cash-out at a later date.

To determine what was going on, the team used magnetic resonance spectroscopy, a form of magnetic resonance imaging that enables researchers to detect levels of certain chemicals in the brain. The investigators found that people who had undertaken the harder task had higher concentrations of the neurotransmitter glutamate in the LPFC than those who had performed the easier one. They also found an increased level of glutamate diffusion in the difficult group, indicating that the molecules were moving faster—which, according to Wiehler, suggests the chemical was building up outside cells, where its movement was less constrained.

When the researchers looked at glutamate in the primary visual cortex—another brain area activated during the experiment because of its role in vision—they found no such changes. “A lot of the existing work had gone into the assumption that fatigue occurs because you deplete a resource of some kind,” says Matthew Apps , a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Birmingham in England, who was not involved in this work. “I think it’s really exciting that there might be a different model whereby the accumulation of materials in the brain may stop it from functioning properly—and that might actually be what leads to the consequences of fatigue on your behavior.”

Apps notes a number of areas where these findings could prove useful. One is in the workplace. For people in jobs that require a sustained intense focus, burnout can lead to detrimental consequences—particularly in a field like surgery. In the future, therapeutics aimed at reversing the buildup of glutamate may help boost these individuals’ ability to sustain attention for long periods of time. Another area of interest would be researching clinical conditions in which fatigue is a symptom, such as chronic fatigue syndrome. The presence of glutamate as a biological marker might shed light on why patients struggle with exhaustion.

Apps adds, however, that defining what fatigue is remains a challenge for the field. “There are sort of different schools of thought about how we measure fatigue and what we’re actually tapping into,” he says. For example, both physical and mental activities can leave us exhausted—but whether similar brain mechanisms underlie these different types of fatigue remains an open question. Research by Apps’s team suggests there may be at least some overlap: in a study published last year, the scientists found that the same brain region appeared to be involved in the buildup of fatigue after a physically demanding task . “It’s clear that there’s going to be physical fatigue that happens in your muscles, but we don’t really know where and if it’s actually separated once you get to a certain level in [the brain],” Apps says.

Wiehler and his colleagues’ new study suggests possible distinctions between subjective feelings of fatigue and more objective measures of mental exhaustion, such as the changes in glutamate concentration the team observed. Anna Kuppuswamy , a neuroscientist at University College London, who was not involved in this work, was intrigued that Wiehler’s team found a difference between subjective and objective measures of fatigue. She says this finding supports what she and others have seen in patients with post-stroke- or multiple-sclerosis-related fatigue, where the level of self-reported fatigue does not always match up with disease severity. This apparent dissociation between perceived fatigue and an actual accumulation of changes in the brain in healthy individuals reaffirms what many in the fatigue field have come to realize: there is “no one single physical factor that can account for the perception of fatigue,” Kuppuswamy says.

For Wiehler, several open questions remain. He says that one limitation of the new study was the focus on two specific regions of the brain, so how cognitively effortful tasks affect other areas remains to be seen. In addition, it is not yet clear why the accumulation of glutamate in the LPFC is a problem or how the balance of glutamate is restored after rest. One possibility is that toxins are flushed out from the brain during sleep, Wiehler says. “There’s tons of research to come,” he adds.

Why Is Critical Thinking Difficult to Teach?

Nimblywise team.

• April 25, 2017

So, why is critical thinking so hard to teach?

Daniel T. Willingham’s seminal 2007 article on the subject is often cited in the materials published over the past decade. In it, Willingham draws on extensive research pointing to the fact that critical thinking is difficult to define, hard to transfer from one setting to another, and challenging to measure and assess.

His point about assessment is echoed in this 2014 report on the state of critical thinking assessment in higher ed. After all, when definitions of critical thinking vary from school to school, or even department to department, setting institutional benchmarks can be a tricky endeavor.

After reviewing the research, it appears there are a few agreed-upon best practices that can lead to the most effective deployment of critical thinking instruction.

• Practice, Practice, Practice: Critical thinking is not a one-off skill. It requires practice to master, and it works best when introduced in a variety of settings so that students can learn how to transfer the skill to novel situations.
• Reinforce Critical Thinking with other Skills: Willingham makes the point that critical thinking is ineffective without an individual’s factual knowledge of a given subject, and their ability to find/evaluate information to help them solve problems and make decisions.
• Consistent Assessment Helps Improve Instruction: 60% of provosts said that getting faculty to use assessment results was their top priority. However, the lack of consistency in both instruction and assessment makes faculty buy-in a challenge. Accurate measurements with actionable results are key to closed-loop assessment. 

Improving critical thinking instruction is an obvious benefit for students, academic institutions, and businesses looking to hire graduates with a broad range of skills. New technology is making it easier to teach critical thinking consistently, as well as assess student gains accurately across departments. For a practical example of how schools are accomplishing this, watch this webinar recording featuring Dr. Stephanie Dance-Barnes, who was able to teach strong critical thinking skills in her biology courses, while also meeting her university’s focus on measurable, real-time assessment throughout the curriculum.

Further reading:

• Kuh, G. D., Jankowski, N., Ikenberry, S. O., & Kinzie, J. (2014). Knowing what students know and can do: The current state of student learning outcomes assessment in U.S. colleges and universities . Champaign, IL: National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment.
• Liu, O. L., Frankel, L. and Roohr, K. C. (2014), Assessing Critical Thinking in Higher Education: Current State and Directions for Next-Generation Assessment. ETS Research Reports Series, 2014: 1–23. doi:10.1002/ets2.12009

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