5 Strategies to Close the Critical Thinking Gap

Key points:

Achievement discrepancies among American students remain persistent and concerning, despite decades of targeted interventions and comprehensive school improvement programs. To make real progress, teachers must address the underlying problem: the critical thinking gap.

Focusing on basic cognitive skills prepares students for success throughout their academic careers. These five critical thinking strategies can help.

Why focus on critical thinking?

Most academic interventions focus on basic knowledge and basic skills: let's practice double-digit addition. Check the parts of the cell. Learn these vocabulary words. Read these passages for fluency. These types of exercises may help students make marginal gains in reading, mathematics, and general content knowledge, but they do not address the root of the problem: learning to think and learn.

Growing evidence points to the role of critical thinking in educational performance. Students need to activate higher-order thinking and metacognition skills to effectively master and retain new content knowledge, synthesize it with prior knowledge, and apply it to new settings and domains. However, most students are not explicitly taught how to do this.

Colin Seale, author of Thinking like a lawyer: A framework for teaching critical thinking to all students. (Prufrock Press, 2020), noted in an interview with ASCD: “When you start looking at how critical thinking is applied in K-12 classrooms, it is often treated as a luxury good. You’ll see critical thinking in an after-school mock trial program, or in an honors program that serves 8 percent of the school population, or on the special debate team, or at the selective-entry school.”

Teaching students how to activate critical thinking and metacognition will allow them to learn more efficiently and effectively. Fortunately, that can be done within the context of the existing curriculum. Below are some ways teachers can get started:

1. Integrate critical thinking with content

Critical thinking should not be something separate and above everything teachers do in the classroom. For best results, it must be fully integrated with the content being taught. Think about the standards you are teaching to. Most will have both a content knowledge component and a thinking component. For example, if the standard requires students to understand the causes of the Revolutionary War, they must know specific content, but they must also understand cause-and-effect thinking. Teachers can help students by explicitly pointing out the type of thinking required (e.g., defining, classifying, part-whole relationships, sequencing, etc.) and making sure students know what that type of thinking looks like.

2. Give students a framework for thinking.

Once students understand the type of thinking required, they need a framework to support it. A visual framework supports the development of critical thinking skills. Making thinking visible and concrete helps students activate the type of thinking required by the task and organize their ideas effectively. While there are tons of graphic organizers out there, it is most beneficial to have a coherent thinking framework that spans grade levels and content areas. This supports the growth of automaticity in the activation of cognitive skills.

3.Make learning active

Models such as project-based learning and inquiry learning have been shown to improve learning outcomes. But it is not necessary to modify the entire curriculum or implement a complicated model to make learning more active. Setting aside time for debate and discussion and collaborative learning activities are simple ways to make learning more active and engaging. For example, students can work together to construct meaning using a mind map. Look for learning activities that require students to go beyond simply reciting facts and engage deeply with the content as they solve a problem, develop and defend a point of view, or create something original.

4. Ask better questions and teach students to ask their own

Increasing the rigor of the questions we ask is another way to support critical thinking. That means asking questions that go beyond basic knowledge and understanding and require higher-order thinking skills such as application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. (See some examples in the image below.) Even better, teach students how to ask their own questions. After introducing new content, for example, pause for a class brainstorming session in which students come up with as many questions as they can, including basic clarifying questions and higher-order types of “why” questions. what if” and “what else.” questions. Students can then work together to begin answering some of these questions using the active learning methods above.

5. Become metacognitive

An important aspect of critical thinking is metacognition or “thinking about one's own thinking.” Students who have skills in metacognition are able to recognize how well they understand a concept, where they need additional help or support, and how to apply and adjust learning strategies. Metacognitive skills include planning learning, monitoring understanding, and evaluating the learning process. Like foundational cognitive skills such as cause and effect or sequencing, metacognitive skills can also be taught explicitly. The questions on the tree maps below can help teachers get started.

These essential strategies can be applied across all grade levels and content areas. When we help students develop fundamental cognitive and metacognitive skills, learning becomes easier and much more fun.