{"id":6676246,"date":"2026-07-05T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-07-05T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/?p=6676246"},"modified":"2026-06-05T16:09:58","modified_gmt":"2026-06-05T21:09:58","slug":"thinking-critically-about-critical-thinking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/thinking-critically-about-critical-thinking\/","title":{"rendered":"Thinking Critically About Critical Thinking"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Almost any teacher will say: &#8220;in our school, we want students to become critical thinkers.&#8221; Once we embrace that praiseworthy goal, we&#8217;ve got some questions to ask. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p>How, exactly, do we help students think critically? <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>Or, here&#8217;s a bigger question: <\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p><em>Can<\/em> we do that? Is critical thinking a skill that can be taught?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>This debate frequently rages in educational circles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Team A says: &#8220;our society needs critical thinkers! Schools <em>should teach this skill<\/em>&#8230;here&#8217;s how.&#8221;<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Team Z says: &#8220;critical thinking isn&#8217;t a generic skill! People need <em>knowledge with which to think critically<\/em>&#8230;schools should teach that knowledge.&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>I myself am sympathetic to Team Z&#8217;s claims. For instance, I&#8217;ve written a book about critically evaluating &#8220;research-based&#8221; claims in education. In that book, I repeatedly warn that I&#8217;m offering steps to think critically about <em>this one topic<\/em>; I&#8217;m not the right guy to think critically about the history of medieval Russia, or innovations in jet engine design, or a new rugby formation. I just don&#8217;t know enough about those topics to guide critical thinking about them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I recently came across a study looking at this question. This study, helpfully, offers both reasons to be optimistic and reasons to be cautious. Here&#8217;s the story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">&#8220;Correlation Isn&#8217;t &#8230;&#8221;<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>A research team <a href=\"https:\/\/psycnet.apa.org\/buy\/2027-52606-001\">looked at 400 students<\/a> taking college-level philosophy courses. About 115 of them took a course called &#8220;Critical Thinking&#8221;; the rest took other intro-level courses: &#8220;Introduction to Philosophy&#8221; and &#8220;Moral Problems.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The critical thinking class focused on common biases or errors in judgment:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>mistaking correlation for causation<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>honoring sunk costs<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>ignoring regression to the mean<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>forgetting about opportunity costs, and <\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>the gambler&#8217;s fallacy (&#8220;if a fair coin comes up heads 8 times, the next toss is REALLY likely to come up tails&#8221;)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>The instructor began the course by offering obvious examples that intuitively resonated with students. Over the course of the term, students practiced applying the rules in many different contexts: athletics, romantic relationships, business, war, friendship, and so forth. The class interleaved these examples, and worked to ensure that students looked for the &#8220;deep structure&#8221; behind them. That is: rather than thinking &#8220;this is a claim about <strong>capital punishment<\/strong>,&#8221; the students learned to think &#8220;this is a claim about <strong>causation<\/strong>&#8230;I should be sure it&#8217;s not relying on correlational data.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>At the end of the course, students in the Critical Thinking class made ENORMOUS strides compared to the students in the other philosophy classes. The effect sizes ranged from 0.91 &#8212; well into the &#8220;large&#8221; range &#8212; to 2.01 &#8212; comfortably in the &#8220;I&#8217;ve never seen anything like it&#8221; range.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Let&#8217;s look at some raw data. For one of the fallacies &#8212; sunk costs &#8212; the control group and the critical thinking group both bought into a &#8220;sunk costs&#8221; logic at the beginning of the term. On a scale of 1 (&#8220;that&#8217;s not a good reason at all&#8221;) to 7 (&#8220;that&#8217;s a really good reason&#8221;), they gave a sunk-costs argument an average rating of 5.5. That is: they substantially agreed that &#8220;past investments should influence future decisions.&#8221; (&#8220;I&#8217;ve read half of this book, so I&#8217;ve got to finish it &#8230; even though I&#8217;m not enjoying it.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>At the end of the term, the control group continued to support this fallacy: they rated sunk costs reasoning at 5.5. The critical thinking students now dropped their average ratings to 1.4: very close to the &#8220;that&#8217;s not a good reason at all&#8221; end of the scale. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Even more impressive, <em>those gains lasted<\/em>. 25% of the enrolled students returned for a post-test sixteen months later. The effect sizes remained roughly 1.00 &#8212; a remarkably high number.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Technically speaking, this was <em>quite a class.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Practicing What We Preach<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Having seen the highlights of this critical-thinking study, let&#8217;s think critically about its methods and conclusions. A few points stand out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>First<\/strong>: students were not randomly placed in these courses; they opted in. Perhaps it&#8217;s unsurprising that students who <em>signed up for a course called &#8220;Critical Thinking&#8221;<\/em> improved at critical thinking. In other words: these students might differ in meaningful ways from students in the other courses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>A related point: these are <em>college students taking philosophy courses<\/em>. That&#8217;s a very select group within a very select group. As I&#8217;ve often argued, we should be cautious about applying college-student data to K-12 education.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><img decoding=\"async\" width=\"1024\" height=\"683\" src=\"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/AdobeStock_300000635-1024x683.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-6676295\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/AdobeStock_300000635-1024x683.jpeg 1024w, https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/AdobeStock_300000635-300x200.jpeg 300w, https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/AdobeStock_300000635-768x512.jpeg 768w, https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/AdobeStock_300000635-1536x1025.jpeg 1536w, https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/AdobeStock_300000635-2048x1366.jpeg 2048w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\" \/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Second<\/strong>: this was one course with one teacher. Maybe this study has identified an unusually effective professor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Third<\/strong>: I gotta say, those effect sizes give me pause. A wise stats-y friend of mine says: &#8220;in education research, an effect size of greater than 1.00 is almost always suspect.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Fourth<\/strong>: the post-test problems weren&#8217;t identical to the class examples&#8230;but they were structurally highly similar. We could plausibly call the results &#8220;near transfer,&#8221; but not &#8220;far transfer.&#8221; <\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Remembering Opportunity Costs<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>When I DO teach <em>this novel<\/em>, I&#8217;m NOT teaching <em>that novel<\/em>. That absence is the &#8220;opportunity cost,&#8221; and we should always be on the lookout for them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In this case, I think we can say: <\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p>College students who opted into a critical thinking class got better at spotting four specific reasoning errors. (They didn&#8217;t get better at spotting the fifth &#8212; the gambler&#8217;s fallacy.) Their ability to spot those fallacies lasted an impressively long time: at least 16 months.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>We don&#8217;t know if other professors are as effective as this one. We don&#8217;t know if such a course would work with younger, or with less interested, students. And &#8212; <strong>crucially<\/strong> &#8212; we don&#8217;t know if students got better at spotting those errors in their actual lives: when reading advertisements for timeshares, or evaluating claims by political parties, or making decisions about medical treatment. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>For the reasons listed in the second paragraph, I worry about summarizing this study by saying &#8220;look, critical thinking CAN be taught&#8221;; instead, I think it arrives at a much more modest set of claims.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And: I worry about opportunity costs. I&#8217;m quite sure that students can&#8217;t think critically without substantial amounts of factual knowledge. I&#8217;m still unsure if students &#8212; even when they do well in a course like the one described above &#8212; <em>actually think critically in real life<\/em>. For that reason, I&#8217;m all in favor of talking with students about critical thinking; I certainly offer up examples of doing so in the classroom (and, I hope, on this blog). I&#8217;m still not persuaded that the time taken to teach a full course on the topic &#8212; especially to younger students &#8212; will accomplish our praiseworthy goal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity is-style-wide\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p>Bishop, M., Feltz, A., &amp; Conway, P. (2026). Critical thinking classes can reduce common biases: Results from a field experiment.\u00a0<em>Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Almost any teacher will say: &#8220;in our school, we want students to become critical thinkers.&#8221; Once we embrace that praiseworthy goal, we&#8217;ve got some questions to ask. How, exactly, do we help students think critically? Or, here&#8217;s a bigger question: Can we do that? Is critical thinking a skill that can be taught? This debate [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":6676295,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[53],"class_list":["post-6676246","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lb-blog","tag-critical-thinking"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6676246","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6676246"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6676246\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6676297,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6676246\/revisions\/6676297"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6676295"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6676246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6676246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6676246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}