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

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Dipper

The article examines how educators can teach critical thinking through cognitive science findings. It explains how the mind works and why teachers’ decisions combine theory, experience, craft knowledge, and intuition. Daniel T. Willingham defines critical thinking as novel, self-directed, and effective, emphasizing effective thinking’s domain-specific conventions. Evidence is reviewed on whether explicit instruction improves student performance, including training in evaluating psychological evidence and limits on general transfer of learning.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages6

Reading Time15 min

AccessFree to download

Ask the Cognitive Scientist

How Can Educators Teach Critical Thinking?

Critical Thinking Can Be Taught

Teaching Critical Thinking for General Transfer

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 interdisciplinaryfield 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. Daniel T. Willingham is a professor of cognitive psychology atthe University of Virginia. He is the author of When Can You Trust the Experts? How to Tell Good Science from Badin Education and Why Don’t Students Like School? His mostrecent 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 ae@aft. org. Future columns will try to address readers’ questions. By Daniel T. Willingham 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’snot 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, andaswe’ll see, what constitutes effective thinking varies from domain to domain. ILLUSTRAT IONS BY JAMES YANG AMERICAN EDUCATOR | FALL 2020 41 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 princi ples 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 typeof 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 Iteach 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 p

FAQs

What does the article say critical thinking means?

Critical thinking is defined as thinking that is novel, self-directed, and effective. Effective thinking follows conventions that make conclusions more likely to be useful.

Does explicit teaching of critical thinking help students, according to the article?

Yes. The article describes experiments where explicit instruction in evaluating evidence helped students perform better on tests requiring evaluation of psychology evidence.

Why is general transfer of critical thinking skills described as challenging?

The article notes that while training can build habits within a domain, research on transfer to new problems is less encouraging. It provides historical examples where expected broad improvements did not reliably occur.

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Dipper