a critical thinking question

85 Critical Thinking Questions to Carefully Examine Any Information

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The ability to think critically will often determine your success in life.

Let’s face it. Every day, we are bombarded by news, social media updates, and an avalanche of information. If you take all of this at face value, it’s easy to be deceived, misled or ripped off.

That’s why it’s important to  develop a mindset that focuses on critical thinking . This is a skill that needs to be developed in the classroom. But it’s also a valuable life skill.

With that in mind, the following post will share 85 critical thinking questions you can use to increase your awareness about different problems by carefully examining available information. 

Let’s get started…

Table of Contents

What Are Critical Thinking Questions?

Critical thinking questions are inquiries that help you think rationally and clearly by understanding the link between different facts or ideas. These questions create a seemingly endless learning process that lets you critique, evaluate, and develop a depth of knowledge about a given subject. Moreover, you get to reinforce your viewpoints or see things in a new way.

We make decisions every day, whether at work or home. Adopting logical, rational, and practical approaches in addressing various issues requiring critical thinking is essential in decision-making. Therefore, before arriving at a decision, always ask yourself relevant questions and carefully analyze the matter’s pros and cons.

Critical Thinking Questions When in an Argument

When you make an argument using a critical thinking approach, you focus on justified claims that are valid and based on evidence. It helps one establish a strong argument.

• Do I disagree with the other person? Might the person I'm arguing with be misinformed on what they are saying?
• Would I be comfortable saying what I am telling him/her if I was in front of a group of people? 
• What would happen if I lose this argument? Is engaging in this argument worth my time and energy? How will I feel if I lose?
• Is there room for ambiguity or misinterpretation? Are we arguing because I didn't make my point explicit? Should I take my time to understand his school of thought?
• Do I need some rest before saying something? Am I arguing because of other reasons other than the issues at hand? Do I need to take some time and cool down?

• Is it more important that I’m right? Am I trying to ask to prove an unnecessary point?
• Is this argument inductive, deductive, or abductive? Is it a weak or strong argument that I need to engage in? Is it compelling or sound? 
• Is my opponent sincere? Given that they are wrong, are they willing to admit that they are wrong? Can they depend on available evidence, wherever it leads?
• Are my opponents only trying to shift their burden to me? What is the best way to prove them wrong without making them feel bad?
• Are the people I'm arguing with only interested in winning, or are they trying to pass some information across and help me discover the truth?

Critical Thinking Questions When Reading a Book 

When you read a book, you probably ask yourself many “why” questions. Why is this a problem? Why did the character say that? Why is this important? The most challenging part of reading a book is assessing the information you are reading. These questions can help.

• If I learn only two things from this book, what will they be? How will they help me? How will I apply them in my daily life?
• What message are the authors trying to pass across? Are they making suggestions or providing evidence for their arguments?
• Given that almost every book is about solving problems, what is the most prevalent issue that the author is trying to solve?
• What is the author’s writing style? What strategy or master plan does the author employ to convey his/her main ideas throughout the book?
• Do I have background information about the book’s topic? If so, how is what the author is saying different from what I already know?
• What didn’t I understand from the book? Should I re-read the book to understand everything the writer is trying to convey?
• Which sections of the book do I love the most, and why? Generally, do I like this book? Should I look for more books that are written by the same author?
• If I had a chance to meet this book’s author, what questions would I ask him/her? What would I tell the writer about the book? Is it a great book worth recommending to your friends and family members?
• Who are the main characters of the book? If there is only one main character, what overarching goal does the character accomplish?
• In what ways did the protagonist change from the start of the book to the end? What caused the changes? Was the protagonist reckless in some ways? Which ways?

Critical Thinking Questions to Spot a Scam

Asking questions when you feel that a fraud or a scam is being presented to you is a good way to stretch your critical thinking muscles. Are you being emailed or messaged by a stranger? Or maybe there are other red flags you are unsure about. If so, ask these questions.

• Does it seem to be too good to be true? Is this stranger pushy or trying to lure me into making a poor decision?
• When trying out online dating: Is my new “friend” professing strong feelings towards me although we’ve only interacted for a few hours?
• Why is a stranger calling me to ask about my Social Security Number (SSN), personal contact information, or bank details while claiming they are from the bank or a phone company? 
• When buying products online, why does the seller ask me to pay for goods using an insecure payment option like Bitcoin or money order?
• Does the email I have received have any spelling or grammatical errors? Is the language used overly formal or informal?
• If I do a quick search about the exact words of the email I received, does Google indicate it's a fraud or scam?
• Why should a stranger manipulate me using obvious questions like “Would you want to be rich or poor?” While they already know the answer?
• Is the email asking me to download an attachment? Or click a link to some insecure website? 
• Is the person trying to make me feel selfish or guilty for not sending them money, whether for a donation or buying a product? 
• Is the stranger portraying a sense of urgency and using pressure tactics? Are they telling me that their family member needs urgent medical attention?

Critical Thinking Questions About Your Life

It can also help to ask yourself a few critical thinking questions about your life. This way, you can gather basic information and uncover solutions to problems you might not have otherwise thought of.

• Where do I wish to be in a few years, probably two, three, or five years? What short-term and long-term goals should I set?
• What have I achieved so far from the time I set my previous goals? What should I be grateful for?
• Do I have any values that guide me in life? If so, what are these values? Am I always true to these values?
• Am I always worried about what people around me think? Can I act independently without the need to meet social expectations?
• What should people say about me at my funeral? Would they talk about how good I made them feel or how rich and flashy I was?
• If I wasn't afraid of anyone or anything, what would I have done? What if I didn't have any fear in me?
• If today was my last day, what extraordinary thing would I do? Can I do it right now?
• What should I do with the things that matter the most to me? 
• What things will make the greatest difference in my future life if I take action now?
• How should I react when I feel unwanted by the people I love the most? Should I tell them?

Critical Thinking Questions for a Debate or Discussion

When you are in the middle of a debate or discussion, you need to know that what you are saying is fact, have evidence to support your claim, and position yourself as an expert in what you are saying. Here are some critical thinking questions to ask when you are in a debate or discussion.

• Is there fairness in this discussion? Is the moderator supporting one side? Do they want to make one side look stupid or wrong? 
• What is the aim of this discussion? Is there a major problem that needs to be solved? If so, how can I help solve it?
• Who are the people affected by this discussion? If they were here, what would they say?
• Do my views on this discussion matter? If I raise my point, will I be redundant?
• What am I supposed to learn from this debate, and how can I use what I have learned in my daily life?
• Does the audience seem to be biased towards one side? Are they booing one side? What can I do even if it's our opponents being booed?
• Who are the discussion panel members? What views have they held about this kind of discussion or any other related discussions in the past?
• How can I make my point without being ambiguous? Before I speak, should I take down some notes to avoid any confusion during my speech?
• Am I ready to apologize if I make a mistake during the discussion? If so, what are the limits?
• What information does my team, or I need before this discussion? 

Critical Thinking Questions About Lying

Admitting when you are wrong, choosing not to cheat, and sharing constructive feedback are all ways to show your honesty. Here are some critical thinking skills to ask regarding lying.

• Will the lie hurt those I am telling, or will it help them? What if being honest might cause my friend unnecessary pain?
• Should I be the one telling this person a lie, or I let someone else do it? 
• Will I be the one hurt if I tell this lie? Will my friend feel I am a betrayer? Will it affect our friendship?
• Do they answer my questions in detail, or are they always trying to ignore and dodge the main problem?
• What if I ask these people the same question using different terms and wording? Will they give me the same response?
• Did the tone of my friend suddenly change after I asked him/her this question? Do they sound louder, faster, or slower compared to how they usually speak?
• Does this person have something to gain by lying to me? What is their motive?
• Does this person take a sudden pause or hesitate more than usual when responding to my question?
• When I look at these people's faces, do their facial expressions match what they say?
• Should I believe this person or not? What are my intuitions? Does it look like they are telling the truth?
• Do they blink like other days when I ask them questions? Are they always trying to avoid direct eye contact?
• Why do they seem uncomfortable when it’s just a normal conversation?  

Critical Thinking Questions When Presented With a Claim

Critical thinking is much more than just evaluating whether a claim is true or not. It also means a critical thinker reflects on what follows from true claims.

• What does this claim mean, and what are its implications? What if it's a false claim?
• Which of my morals, values, or beliefs do I have to give up to accept this claim?
• Do professionals in this field agree or disagree with the claim that has been made?
• Do they have evidence to back their claim? Which is the most robust evidence to support the claim?
• What argument can I come up with to refute this claim? Or what is the best view that can support this claim?
• Who is the primary source of the claim being made? Is the basis of the claim reliable?
• Is it a claim, or it's just an opinion?
• Is the claim likely to be 100% false, true, or partially true?
• Am I allowed to refute the claim and table my evidence, or is it one-sided?

Critical Thinking Interview Questions

Critical thinking skills are valuable in any industry or field and for almost all roles. During a job interview, you will be asked questions so the potential employer can assess your skills and see how you use logic. Your critical thinking ability is just one vital part that can play into your professional development.

• Is there a time you had to convince someone to use an alternate approach to solve a problem?
• Have you ever had to make a difficult decision quickly?
• How would you handle a situation where your supervisor handled something wrong or made a mistake?
• What is one of the most difficult decisions you have ever had to make at work?
• How would you solve a disagreement between coworkers when approaching a project?
• Can you describe a time when you anticipated a problem ahead of time and took the appropriate steps to stop the problem from becoming an issue?
• If you discover a cheaper way to do something or a better solution to a problem and try to explain it to your supervisor, but they don’t understand, what do you do?

Critical Thinking Questions for Kids

We can’t leave the kids out either. Critical thinking questions for kids get them thinking and talking. It also allows a parent to get to know their child better.

• How many grains of sand do you think are on the beach?
• What would happen if it stopped raining?
• Do you think there is life on other planets?
• Should children be able to set their own bedtimes?
• How would you describe what a tree looks like without saying green or leaves?
• Can you name five different emotions?
• Can you talk for five minutes without uttering “um?”

What Are the Basic Principles of Critical Thinking?

Your critical thinking skills involve gathering complete information, understanding and defining terms, questioning the methods by which we get facts, questioning the conclusions, and looking for hidden assumptions and biases.

Additionally, we can’t expect to find all of the answers, and we need to take the time to examine the big picture of it all.

Here are the basic principles:

• Disposition: Someone with critical thinking skills is often skeptical, open-minded, and practices fair-mindedness. They can look at different viewpoints and change positions if the evidence and reason lead them to do so.
• Criteria: In order to think critically, one must also apply criteria. Certain conditions must be met before someone believes in something. The information needs to be from credible sources.
• Argument: An argument is simply a statement or proposition that is shown with supporting evidence. When you use your critical thinking skills, you identify, evaluate, and construct your argument.
• Reasoning: With critical thinking comes reasoning. You must examine logical relationships among the statements being made.
• Point of View: Critical thinkers can see things from different perspectives and different points of view.

What Are Good Analysis Questions?

Analysis is a part of critical thinking that allows you to examine something carefully. Someone with analytical skills can examine the information presented, understand what that information means, and then properly explain that information to others. Analysis in critical thinking provides more clarity on the information you process.

When analyzing, you may ask yourself, “how do I know this,” how would I solve this problem,” and “why does it matter?”

Why Is Critical Thinking an Important Skill?

Critical thinking skills allow you to express thoughts, ideas, and beliefs in a better way. It also leads to improved communication while allowing others to understand you better. Critical thinking fosters creativity and encourages out-of-the-box thinking. This is a skill that can be applied to many different areas of your life.

For example, knowing the answers to critical thinking questions for a job interview will better prepare you for the interview. Many employers, during questioning, are likely to ask you critical thinking questions to assess if you have the ability to evaluate information effectively so you can make more informed decisions.

Final Thoughts on Critical Thinking Questions

Although it's common to get torn between making two or more choices, nobody wants to make the wrong decision. The only thing you can do to avoid this is use critical thinking questions to examine your situation. The answers to these questions will help you make informed decisions and help you comprehend crucial matters in your life. 

Want to learn more about critical thinking and decision-making using a real-life example? Here is  how Jeff Bezos uses critical thinking  to make some of the most challenging life decisions.

Finally, if you want to ask better questions, then watch this short, 20-minute course to learn how to have a great conversation with virtually anyone .

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100+ Critical Thinking Questions for Students To Ask About Anything

Critical thinkers question everything.

In an age of “fake news” claims and constant argument about pretty much any issue, critical thinking skills are key. Teach your students that it’s vital to ask questions about everything, but that it’s also important to ask the right sorts of questions. Students can use these critical thinking questions with fiction or nonfiction texts. They’re also useful when discussing important issues or trying to understand others’ motivations in general.

“Who” Critical Thinking Questions

Questions like these help students ponder who’s involved in a story and how the actions affect them. They’ll also consider who’s telling the tale and how reliable that narrator might be.

• Is the protagonist?
• Is the antagonist?
• Caused harm?
• Is harmed as a result?
• Was the most important character?

• Is responsible?
• Is most directly affected?
• Should have won?
• Will benefit?
• Would be affected by this?

• Makes the decisions?

“What” Critical Thinking Questions

Ask questions that explore issues more deeply, including those that might not be directly answered in the text.

• Background information do I know or need to know?
• Is the main message?
• Are the defining characteristics?

• Questions or concerns do I have?
• Don’t I understand?
• Evidence supports the author’s conclusion?
• Would it be like if … ?
• Could happen if … ?
• Other outcomes might have happened?
• Questions would you have asked?
• Would you ask the author about … ?
• Was the point of … ?
• Should have happened instead?
• Is that character’s motive?
• Else could have changed the whole story?

• Can you conclude?
• Would your position have been in that situation?
• Would happen if … ?
• Makes your position stronger?
• Was the turning point?
• Is the point of the question?
• Did it mean when … ?
• Is the other side of this argument?
• Was the purpose of … ?
• Does ______ mean?
• Is the problem you are trying to solve?
• Does the evidence say?
• Assumptions are you making?
• Is a better alternative?
• Are the strengths of the argument?

• Are the weaknesses of the argument?
• Is the difference between _______ and _______?

“Where” Critical Thinking Questions

Think about where the story is set and how it affects the actions. Plus, consider where and how you can learn more.

• Would this issue be a major problem?
• Are areas for improvement?
• Did the story change?
• Would you most often find this problem?

• Are there similar situations?
• Would you go to get answers to this problem?
• Can this be improved?
• Can you get more information?
• Will this idea take us?

“When” Critical Thinking Questions

Think about timing and the effect it has on the characters or people involved.

• Is this acceptable?
• Is this unacceptable?

• Does this become a problem?
• Is the best time to take action?
• Will we be able to tell if it worked?
• Is it time to reassess?
• Should we ask for help?
• Is the best time to start?
• Is it time to stop?
• Would this benefit society?

• Has this happened before?

“Why” Critical Thinking Questions

Asking “why” might be one of the most important parts of critical thinking. Exploring and understanding motivation helps develop empathy and make sense of difficult situations.

• Is _________ happening?
• Have we allowed this to happen?
• Should people care about this issue?

• Is this a problem?
• Did the character say … ?
• Did the character do … ?
• Is this relevant?
• Did the author write this?
• Did the author decide to … ?
• Is this important?

• Did that happen?
• Is it necessary?
• Do you think I (he, she, they) asked that question?
• Is that answer the best one?
• Do we need this today?

“How” Critical Thinking Questions

Use these questions to consider how things happen and whether change is possible.

• Do we know this is true?
• Does the language used affect the story?
• Would you solve … ?
• Is this different from other situations?

• Is this similar to … ?
• Would you use … ?
• Does the location affect the story?
• Could the story have ended differently?
• Does this work?
• Could this be harmful?
• Does this connect with what I already know?
• Else could this have been handled?
• Should they have responded?

• Would you feel about … ?
• Does this change the outcome?
• Did you make that decision?
• Does this benefit you/others?
• Does this hurt you/others?
• Could this problem be avoided?

More Critical Thinking Questions

Here are more questions to help probe further and deepen understanding.

• Can you give me an example?

• Do you agree with … ?
• Can you compare this with … ?
• Can you defend the actions of … ?
• Could this be interpreted differently?
• Is the narrator reliable?
• Does it seem too good to be true?

• Is ______ a fact or an opinion?

What are your favorite critical thinking questions? Come exchange ideas on the WeAreTeachers HELPLINE group on Facebook .

Plus, check out 10 tips for teaching kids to be awesome critical thinkers ., you might also like.

5 Critical Thinking Skills Every Kid Needs To Learn (And How To Teach Them)

Teach them to thoughtfully question the world around them. Continue Reading

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Critical thinking

200+ critical thinking questions.

“Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.” – Voltaire As critical thinkers, it’s our job to question everything, instead of just blindly believing what we’re told, but what kinds of questions should we be asking though? What are the “right” questions to ask? In this article I’ve compiled a list of 200+ […]

“Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.” – Voltaire

As critical thinkers, it’s our job to question everything, instead of just blindly believing what we’re told, but what kinds of questions should we be asking though?

What are the “right” questions to ask?

In this article I’ve compiled a list of 200+ of the very best critical thinking questions for almost any situation.

Critical thinking questions:

• If you’re presented with a claim

If you’re reading a book, listening to a podcast, watching TV or YouTube

If you’re watching an interview.

• In a group or panel discussion
• In an argument or debate

If you’re watching the news

• If you want to spot a lie

If you want to spot a scam

• If you’re presented with statistics
• Critical thinking about your life

Let’s begin:

• Is this an argument, a claim, a belief, an opinion, or a fact?

When you’re presented with information, whether it’s something you’re reading, watching or listening to, ask yourself:

• How do you know it’s a fact?
• What evidence exists to support this “fact”?
• Has this “fact” been proven?
• Do the majority of experts on the subject agree that this is a fact? Is there an expert consensus on this fact? If not, why not?
• Is this an ordinary or extraordinary claim?
• Do the majority of experts agree with this claim? Or is it contentious?
• What is the source of this claim?
• Who is making this claim?
• Is this person an authority or expert?
• How reliable is this source?
• What are the best arguments in support of this claim?
• What do the harshest critics against this position say?
• What arguments do skeptics of this position give?
• Has this claim already been debunked?
• Is this evidence good enough to accept the arguers assertions?
• Would this evidence stand up in court?
• Or is the arguer/author/speaker making assertions without evidence?
• What is the strongest evidence against this claim?
• Is there more confirming or disconfirming evidence?
• Is the expert consensus (if there is one) for or against this claim? Why?
• Do the majority of experts agree or disagree with this claim? Why?
• How can we verify or falsify this claim?
• A statement may be true, but is it relevant? Why?
• To what degree? To what extent?
• Under what conditions?
• In what context or circumstances?
• This claim is 100% true
• This claim is 100% false
• This claim is mostly true, partly false
• This claim is mostly false, partly true
• This claim is half true, half false
• Remember: There are degrees of “rightness” and “wrongness”. Statements are rarely 100% true or 100% false
• What further claims does this claim logically entail?
• Which of my beliefs would I have to change if I were to accept this claim?
• If this is an argument, is it deductive or inductive?
• If an argument is deductive, is it sound, valid, invalid, or unsound?
• If an argument is inductive, is it cogent, strong, weak, or unsound?
• How do you know this?
• How did you determine this?
• What evidence or proof do you have for this claim?
• What is their background?
• What makes them qualified to speak on this subject?
• Are they an expert in the field?
• On what basis is the author or speaker an authority or expert on the subject, or at least credible?
• Are they conservative or liberal?
• Atheist or religious?
• Feminist or MGTOW?
• (No author/speaker is completely neutral, unbiased and objective)
• When was the article, book, podcast, video etc., written or recorded? Is it possibly outdated? Is there a more recent up-to-date version available?
• Why did the author write this article/book?
• Why is the speaker giving this talk? What is their motivation?
• What is the purpose of this information? Why was it created?
• Why did I choose to read/watch/listen to it?
• Who benefits from this information? Why? How?
• Is this information relevant to you? If so, how? Why do you need to know this? How does it affect you personally?
• What are the authors/speakers main arguments and assertions? What is their philosophy? What are their main points?
• Is the author/speaker arguing for anything controversial? If so, there are likely to be good counterarguments on the other side
• Anonymous authorities aka “weasel words” e.g. “experts say…” “scientists say…” “studies show…”
• Deductive or inductive reasoning
• Expert opinion
• Expert consensus
• Randomized controlled trials
• Scientific studies
• Scientific consensus
• Or are they making assertions without evidence?
• What is the strongest evidence in support of these assertions? Is this evidence good enough to accept the authors/speakers conclusions? Would it stand up in court?
• What is the strongest evidence against these assertions?
• What might be another equally valid interpretation of the evidence or study results?
• What conclusions does the author/speaker want you to draw? What do they want you to think/believe/understand/do?
• Is the author/speaker/news station trying to push a narrative? e.g. “Diversity”, “Gender pay gap”, “Immigration”?
• Do you agree with the authors/speakers assertions? Why/why not? Anything you disagree with?
• Do you agree with the authors/speakers philosophy? Why/why not? Anything you disagree with?
• Do you agree with the authors/speakers “facts” and description of “reality”? Why/why not? Anything you disagree with?
• Do you agree with the authors/speakers arguments and rationale? Why/why not? Anything you disagree with?
• Are there any fallacies in the authors/speakers argument or rationale? If so, what?
• Does the author/speaker address counterarguments, disconfirming evidence, objections etc.? If so, how effectively do they rebut these points?
• If the author/speaker provides a “rule”, are there any exceptions to the rule that are not explained or accounted for?
• Do you agree with the authors/speakers conclusions? Why/why not? (You might agree with their arguments and rationale but not with their conclusions) Are they backed up by sufficient evidence? Or is the author/speaker jumping to conclusions too quickly from insufficient evidence?
• Are there any other equally valid conclusions or interpretations that could have been drawn from the evidence, or any other competing theories with better explanations for the evidence? If so, what?
• What is the perspective of the author/speaker? Do they seem like an insider or outsider? Why?
• Whose perspective is this information presented from? America’s or someone else’s? Conservative or liberal? Men or Women? Gen X, Y or Z?
• What perspectives/viewpoints are not represented here? What other perspectives might be equally valid, or worth looking into?
• What would (person) say about it?
• What would (group) say about it?
• Is there better evidence for one perspective/viewpoint than another?
• Is the author/speaker presenting you with both sides of the story – or only one?
• How has the author/speaker framed the information or story?
• Is the author/speaker embellishing or sensationalizing the story for dramatic effect? Do you think the story really took place the way the author/speaker tells it?
• What assumptions is the author/speaker making? What does the author/speaker have to believe is true before the rest of their argument makes sense?
• What are the implications of the authors/speakers argument? If this is true, what else must be true?
• What are the main problems the author/speaker is trying to solve? What solutions do they propose?
• Do you agree with the authors/speakers proposed solutions? Can you think of even better solutions to these problems?
• Has the author/speaker identified the real problem/s, or only a symptom of the problem?
• Is the author/speakers analysis or solution to the problem or situation oversimplified or incomplete? What needs to be unpacked or expanded upon?
• Is the author/speaker engaged in oversimplified black and white thinking as if something “always” or “never” happens, or as if “everyone” or “no one” should think/believe/do something, or as if something was right/wrong, true/false, correct/incorrect, without any grey areas in between?
• Are you engaged in black and white thinking, as if “everything” or “nothing” the author/speaker says is true? Or are you judging the validity of the information line by line, sentence by sentence, claim by claim, realizing that some parts could be true, and other parts false?
• Is the author/speaker emotional reasoning? Is it facts over feelings, or feels over reals?
• How would you describe the author/speakers tone? Dogmatic? Overconfident? Emotive? Pay attention not only to what  is said, but  how it’s said. How does the tone affect your response to the speech/text?
• Is the author/speaker using emotive language/tonality, and/or dramatic images or video, in an attempt to alarm, scare or outrage you?
• Is the author/speaker guilty of magical or superstitious thinking? Is there a lot of talk of “the law of attraction”, “miracles”, “soul mates” etc.?
• Does the author/speaker treat their opponents charitably and fairly? Do they treat the other side as intelligent people with a difference of opinion/perspective? Or do they demonize them as “crazy”, “dangerous”, “evil”, “dumb”, “stupid”, “racist”, “sexist”, “homophobic”, “transphobic” etc.?
• Does the author/speaker seem intellectually honest? Trustworthy? Why/why not?
• Is the author/speaker trying to be objective in their analysis and critique? Perfect objectivity isn’t possible, but are they even trying to be impartial, unbiased and objective?
• Yes: Be careful you’re not automatically believing everything they have to say without evidence, and letting them do your thinking for you
• No: Be careful you’re not automatically dismissing everything they have to say because you don’t like them (Remember: Examine the statement – not the speaker)
• Yes: Beware because you’re more likely to believe it whether it’s true or not
• No: Beware because you’re more likely to dismiss it whether it’s true or not
• The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth
• Half-truths and holding something back
• Straight up lying
• Is the author/speaker misquoting people, or taking quotes out of context?
• Did the person really say …? Is this a real quote/tweet? Or has the person been misquoted or quoted out of context? Is this a fake tweet?
• How are you going to use this information? What are you going to do with it? How are you going to put it into practice? How will it make a difference to your life?
• What is the purpose of this interview? Is it to educate or entertain the audience? Is it to promote a product or service?
• Who is the interviewee? Why is this person being interviewed?
• When did this interview take place? Is this information possibly outdated and no longer relevant?
• Is the interviewer asking the interviewee mostly softball or hardball questions?
• Is the interviewer asking the interviewee a lot of leading, loaded or gotcha questions? Do they seem to be trying to lead or trap the interviewee? e.g. “Yeah, but isn’t it true that…”, “Yeah, but don’t you think…”, “Yeah, but what about…”
• Is the interviewer really listening to the interviewee? Are they making a real effort to try to understand the interviewee and their position, or are they simply trying to promote or condemn it?
• Is the interviewer deliberately trying to make the interviewee look bad? e.g. Are they being overly disagreeable or standoffish? Do they only ask hardball or gotcha questions and then interrupt the interviewee mid-sentence with another difficult question every time the interviewee starts to give a good answer?
• Does the interviewer interrupt or cut off the interviewee if they start talking about anything controversial, or if they start talking about anything that doesn’t align with the narrative of the network e.g. anti-abortion, pro-gun or pro-Trump comments?
• Has the interview been edited to make the interviewee look bad, to paint them in a negative light?
• What additional questions would you ask the interviewee that the interviewer didn’t ask?

If you’re watching a group or panel discussion

If you’re watching a group discussion or debate, especially on a contentious topic e.g. abortion or gun control:

• Who are the panel members? What makes these people authorities or experts on the subject?
• Are both sides of the debate equally represented with intelligent people? Or is one side represented by heavyweights and the other side lightweights?
• Is there an equal distribution of liberal and conservative pundits? Or is it a majority liberal panel with a token conservative? (or vice versa)
• Does the host seem biased towards one side over the other? Is the host picking sides and showing their approval/disapproval of one side?
• Is the audience showing an obvious bias to one side of the debate? Are they only applauding/booing one side of the debate?
• Is the host giving more airtime, credibility and/or respect to one side?
• Is the host trying to make one side look bad, ignorant or stupid?

In an argument or a debate

If you’re in an argument or a debate, or watching one:

• Is this an argument or an assertion? If it’s an argument, is it deductive, inductive or abductive? Is it sound or cogent? Valid or invalid? Strong or weak?
• Are all of the premises true and correct? Do all of the premises necessarily lead to the conclusion? Are there any unjustified leaps of logic?
• Am I clear on how each word is being defined in the argument?
• Is someone attempting to redefine words e.g. “rational”, “reasonable”,   “racist” etc., to support their preferred conclusion?
• Is someone trying to shift the burden of proof? Note: The burden of proof is the obligation to provide evidence to support one’s assertion e.g. “You are guilty” and it is always on the one making the claim – not the other way around
• Has this argument already been debunked?
• Is someone making a PRATT? (Point refuted a thousand times)
• Is this a strawman or steelman argument?
• Is this the best argument in support of …?
• What are the best arguments in support of …?
• What are the best arguments against …?
• What is the strongest evidence in support of …?
• What is the strongest evidence against …?
• Is the preponderance of evidence for or against …? Is there more confirming or disconfirming evidence?
• Is the expert consensus (if there is one) for or against …? Why?
• Do the majority of experts agree or disagree with …? Why?
• Are there any fallacies in this argument or rationale? If so, what? (Fallacies don’t necessarily make an argument invalid but it’s still good to be aware of them)
• Am I 100% certain I understand my opponent’s position? Am I sure? Could I argue my opponent’s position convincingly? Could I steelman it? Could I pass the Ideological Turing Test? If not, you don’t understand it. Don’t argue for or against a position until you fully understand it
• What are the strongest points of my opponent’s argument?
• What are the weakest points of my opponent’s argument?
• What are the weakest points of my argument?
• What is the strongest evidence against my position?
• What are the best arguments against my position?
• How would I attack my argument if I had to?
• What do I like about my opponent’s position, and what do I dislike about mine?
• What aspects of my argument are likely to be unconvincing to those that don’t already agree with me?
• Does my opponent seem intellectually honest? Are they arguing in good faith? Are they willing to follow the evidence where it leads? Are they willing to admit when they’re mistaken or wrong? Am I?
• Does my opponent seem more interested in “winning” the argument or discovering the truth?

Ask the other person:

• How did you determine that?
• How did you come to that conclusion?
• What do you know that I don’t?
• Where am I wrong in my argument or rationale?
• What evidence would it take to change your mind, to convince you otherwise?
• Are these your real reasons for believing X? If all of these reasons were proven wrong, would you still continue to believe X? If yes, let’s not even worry about these reasons because they’re not the real reasons you believe X. What are the real reasons you believe X?
• Why do you think other smart people aren’t convinced by the same arguments and evidence that you are?
• Associated Press News
• The Bureau of Investigative Journalism
• The Economist
• Pro Publica
• What is the bias of this news station? Are they liberal or conservative? You can check the bias of a particular news station here:  Media Bias Fact Check
• Fear mongering
• Gossip/rumors
• Hatchet jobs
• Outrage porn
• Puff pieces
• Is this really the most important “news” of the day? Why is this story being prioritized over everything else that happened today?
• Why do I need to know this? How does it affect me?
• What is the purpose of this news story? Why was it created? What does the news station want you to think/believe/do?
• When was this news story published? Is this information current, or is it outdated and/or no longer relevant?
• Has this story already been debunked?
• Truth or Fiction
• The Washington Post Fact Checker
• Hoax Slayer

Check these websites to see if a claim or story has already been debunked, but don’t rely on any of these websites to do your thinking for you, because they may mislead you with their own political biases

• Has this story or headline been written to educate, entertain or infuriate you?
• Is the headline an accurate summary of the information – or is it just clickbait?
• Do the photos fit the story?
• Has an unflattering photo been deliberately chosen to paint the subject e.g. Trump in a bad light?
• Is it likely that this story has been embellished or sensationalized?
• How has this information been framed or spun?
• Are you being presented with both sides of the story – or only one?
• Whose perspective is this presented from? Conservative or liberal? America’s or someone else’s? Men or Women? What other perspectives might be equally valid, or worth looking into?
• What do the other news stations say? e.g. if you watch CNN or MSNBC, what does CBS or FOX say? (and vice versa)
• Are you being presented with facts or opinions?  If “facts”, on what basis are they “facts”? What evidence exists to support these “facts”?
• Do the media’s “facts” and description of “reality” seem accurate? Why/why not? Anything you disagree with?
• Did someone really say that? Or have they been misquoted or quoted out of context?
• Does the domain look credible?
• Is this satire?

How to spot a liar

• Does it seem like this person is lying or telling the truth? Why? Are they a known liar?
• Is this person motivated to deceive me? Do they stand to gain something by lying to me? What might this person gain by lying to me?
• Dodge the question
• Ignore the question
• Attack you for asking the question, “How could you ask me a question like that!”
• Refuse to answer the question
• Answer a different question
• Turn the question back on you, “I could ask you the same thing!”
• Give short one word answers
• Give vague or ambiguous answers
• Talk around in circles without answering the question
• If you ask the person the same question multiple times using different words, do they give different answers and contradict themselves? Do the details in their story keep changing?
• Uncomfortable
• Does the person speak slower or faster or louder than normal when answering your questions?
• Does the person hesitate, take long pauses, or talk slower than normal when answering your questions? (maybe in an attempt to think on the spot and buy time?)
• Do they avoid eye contact and/or cover their mouth when answering questions?
• Do they start sentences and not finish them, or change topics and start talking about something else mid-sentence?
• Does the tone or volume of their voice change? Does their voice crack and/or go higher than normal? Do they cough repetitively and clear their throat, or stammer or stutter?
• Do they blink rapidly, or not at all, or have a fake or nervous smile?
• Do they roll their lips back or purse them?
• Does their body language seem uncomfortable?
• Do their emotions and facial expressions match their words? When they say they’re “good” or “okay”, do they seem good or okay?
• Does it seem like they’re in a hurry to change the subject?
• This person is telling “The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth”
• This person is telling half-truths and holding something back
• This person is playing dumb and pretending to know less than they do
• This person is straight up lying
• What does your gut/intuition say? Does it seem like they’re lying or telling you the truth? (or both)
• Is a stranger emailing, texting or calling you out of the blue claiming something too good to be true? e.g. you’ve entitled to a large inheritance – and all you need to do is provide bank details, or pay taxes or transfer costs? Or that you’ve won a prize in a competition or lottery you’ve never entered?
• Is someone calling you claiming to be from your bank, gas/electricity provider, phone company etc. and asking you to verify your personal contact details, password, bank details, credit card number etc.? maybe due to “unauthorized” or “suspicious activity” on your account?
• Does a google search on the exact wording of the email, text or ad reveal a scam?
• Does the email contain any grammatical or spelling errors, or overly formal language?
• Does the email ask you to click a link or open an attachment?
• If you’re buying something online is the seller asking you to make payment with an insecure payment option? e.g. direct bank transfer, money order, or a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin?
• In an online dating scenario, is someone professing strong feelings for you after only a few encounters?
• Does the person have a sense of urgency? Are they claiming to need money urgently for a personal or family emergency, medical attention, or to come see you?
• Is someone using pressure tactics, and trying to make you feel guilty or selfish for not buying their product or service, or donating to a charity?
• Is someone trying to manipulate you with sleazy sales/self-help seminar type questions e.g. “Do you want to be rich or poor?” “A winner or a loser?” “A success or a failure?”
• Does it seem too good to be true? Does it seem like a scam? If so, it probably is
• What does your gut/intuition say?

Statistics questions

“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” – Benjamin Disraeli

Ask yourself the following questions whenever you’re presented with any statistic:

• Who paid for the study or survey?
• Who conducted the study or survey? Does it come from a credible source?
• Why was the study or survey done? What is the likely agenda?
• When was the study done? Is the information outdated? Is it still relevant? Times change. Public opinion changes
• Who was polled? Conservatives or liberals? Men or women? Asians, Blacks, Hispanics or Whites? What age group? Gen X, Y or Z? How diverse was the group?
• How large was the sample size? How many people were surveyed? Is the sample size large enough? Is it qualitative, quantitative, or mixed methods? Was the sample size sufficient?  Was it  representative enough of the wider population? Did the participants come from different cultural and social backgrounds? How generalizable are the findings?
• What are the statistics measuring?
• How long did the information take to gather? Was it a 2 week survey? A 6 month study? A 10 year study?
• What questions were asked?
• How was each question asked? Were the questions leading or loaded or worded in such a way as to encourage a certain answer?
• What is the context of the survey?
• How was the research done? Phone, email, social media, face to face?
• What is the number as a percentage? e.g. 55, 000 Americans is 0.0167% of the population
• Is the percentage statistically insignificant? e.g. 500, 000 Americans might be addicted to Heroin, but as a percentage that’s ‘only’ (any number above one is obviously too high) 0.153% of Americans
• Do the author’s conclusions and the headline logically follow from the data? Or are they reading too much into the data? Find the raw data if you can. Don’t just accept and believe headlines for statistics. Make sure it says what the headline says it says. Statistical headlines are often used to suggest things the data doesn’t actually say
• Is the research confusing causation and correlation? Check out: spurious correlations for a perfect visual example of why correlation does not equal causation
• Has this study been peer reviewed by experts?
• Beware of unsourced statistics

“I can prove anything by statistics except the truth.” – George Canning 

Critical thinking about your life questions

“The unexamined life is not worth living” – Socrates

You can apply critical thinking to the books you read, the podcasts you listen to, the information and “news” presented to you, but ultimately, what better place to apply critical thinking skills than to your own life?

• Which biases and fallacies are you most guilty of?
• Where/when do you most often fail to practice critical thinking?
• What are your sacred cows? What shouldn’t be questioned? What is off limits? God? Jesus? Buddha? Krishna? Muhammad? The Bible? The Bhagavad Gita? The Quran? Your Guru?
• What do you need to start/stop doing?
• What do you need to do more/less of?
• What are your best/worst habits?
• Where do you waste the most time?
• Who/what should you cut out of your life?
• What one thing, if you were to take action on it, would produce the greatest difference in your life?
• A year from now, what will you wish you had started today?

Recommended reading

For additional critical thinking questions check out:

Critical Reading: The Ultimate Guide

The Socratic Method

50 Critical thinking tips

A Crash Course in Critical Thinking

What you need to know—and read—about one of the essential skills needed today..

Posted April 8, 2024 | Reviewed by Michelle Quirk

• In research for "A More Beautiful Question," I did a deep dive into the current crisis in critical thinking.
• Many people may think of themselves as critical thinkers, but they actually are not.
• Here is a series of questions you can ask yourself to try to ensure that you are thinking critically.

Conspiracy theories. Inability to distinguish facts from falsehoods. Widespread confusion about who and what to believe.

These are some of the hallmarks of the current crisis in critical thinking—which just might be the issue of our times. Because if people aren’t willing or able to think critically as they choose potential leaders, they’re apt to choose bad ones. And if they can’t judge whether the information they’re receiving is sound, they may follow faulty advice while ignoring recommendations that are science-based and solid (and perhaps life-saving).

Moreover, as a society, if we can’t think critically about the many serious challenges we face, it becomes more difficult to agree on what those challenges are—much less solve them.

On a personal level, critical thinking can enable you to make better everyday decisions. It can help you make sense of an increasingly complex and confusing world.

In the new expanded edition of my book A More Beautiful Question ( AMBQ ), I took a deep dive into critical thinking. Here are a few key things I learned.

First off, before you can get better at critical thinking, you should understand what it is. It’s not just about being a skeptic. When thinking critically, we are thoughtfully reasoning, evaluating, and making decisions based on evidence and logic. And—perhaps most important—while doing this, a critical thinker always strives to be open-minded and fair-minded . That’s not easy: It demands that you constantly question your assumptions and biases and that you always remain open to considering opposing views.

In today’s polarized environment, many people think of themselves as critical thinkers simply because they ask skeptical questions—often directed at, say, certain government policies or ideas espoused by those on the “other side” of the political divide. The problem is, they may not be asking these questions with an open mind or a willingness to fairly consider opposing views.

When people do this, they’re engaging in “weak-sense critical thinking”—a term popularized by the late Richard Paul, a co-founder of The Foundation for Critical Thinking . “Weak-sense critical thinking” means applying the tools and practices of critical thinking—questioning, investigating, evaluating—but with the sole purpose of confirming one’s own bias or serving an agenda.

In AMBQ , I lay out a series of questions you can ask yourself to try to ensure that you’re thinking critically. Here are some of the questions to consider:

• Why do I believe what I believe?
• Are my views based on evidence?
• Have I fairly and thoughtfully considered differing viewpoints?
• Am I truly open to changing my mind?

Of course, becoming a better critical thinker is not as simple as just asking yourself a few questions. Critical thinking is a habit of mind that must be developed and strengthened over time. In effect, you must train yourself to think in a manner that is more effortful, aware, grounded, and balanced.

For those interested in giving themselves a crash course in critical thinking—something I did myself, as I was working on my book—I thought it might be helpful to share a list of some of the books that have shaped my own thinking on this subject. As a self-interested author, I naturally would suggest that you start with the new 10th-anniversary edition of A More Beautiful Question , but beyond that, here are the top eight critical-thinking books I’d recommend.

The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark , by Carl Sagan

This book simply must top the list, because the late scientist and author Carl Sagan continues to be such a bright shining light in the critical thinking universe. Chapter 12 includes the details on Sagan’s famous “baloney detection kit,” a collection of lessons and tips on how to deal with bogus arguments and logical fallacies.

Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments Into Extraordinary Results , by Shane Parrish

The creator of the Farnham Street website and host of the “Knowledge Project” podcast explains how to contend with biases and unconscious reactions so you can make better everyday decisions. It contains insights from many of the brilliant thinkers Shane has studied.

Good Thinking: Why Flawed Logic Puts Us All at Risk and How Critical Thinking Can Save the World , by David Robert Grimes

A brilliant, comprehensive 2021 book on critical thinking that, to my mind, hasn’t received nearly enough attention . The scientist Grimes dissects bad thinking, shows why it persists, and offers the tools to defeat it.

Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know , by Adam Grant

Intellectual humility—being willing to admit that you might be wrong—is what this book is primarily about. But Adam, the renowned Wharton psychology professor and bestselling author, takes the reader on a mind-opening journey with colorful stories and characters.

Think Like a Detective: A Kid's Guide to Critical Thinking , by David Pakman

The popular YouTuber and podcast host Pakman—normally known for talking politics —has written a terrific primer on critical thinking for children. The illustrated book presents critical thinking as a “superpower” that enables kids to unlock mysteries and dig for truth. (I also recommend Pakman’s second kids’ book called Think Like a Scientist .)

Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters , by Steven Pinker

The Harvard psychology professor Pinker tackles conspiracy theories head-on but also explores concepts involving risk/reward, probability and randomness, and correlation/causation. And if that strikes you as daunting, be assured that Pinker makes it lively and accessible.

How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion and Persuasion , by David McRaney

David is a science writer who hosts the popular podcast “You Are Not So Smart” (and his ideas are featured in A More Beautiful Question ). His well-written book looks at ways you can actually get through to people who see the world very differently than you (hint: bludgeoning them with facts definitely won’t work).

A Healthy Democracy's Best Hope: Building the Critical Thinking Habit , by M Neil Browne and Chelsea Kulhanek

Neil Browne, author of the seminal Asking the Right Questions: A Guide to Critical Thinking, has been a pioneer in presenting critical thinking as a question-based approach to making sense of the world around us. His newest book, co-authored with Chelsea Kulhanek, breaks down critical thinking into “11 explosive questions”—including the “priors question” (which challenges us to question assumptions), the “evidence question” (focusing on how to evaluate and weigh evidence), and the “humility question” (which reminds us that a critical thinker must be humble enough to consider the possibility of being wrong).

Warren Berger is a longtime journalist and author of A More Beautiful Question .

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150 Fun Critical Thinking Questions For Kids, Teens, & Adults

Critical thinking questions for kids get them thinking and questioning. To go beyond rote learning.

The reason they excel later in life will not be based on the information they memorized. But instead on how well they think, make decisions, communicate, and use their creativity.

These questions are designed to help them build these essential skills.

What makes a good critical thinking question?

Open ended questions are perfect for encouraging critical thinking and problem-solving. Kids (and grown-ups) have to think about their answers. Below you will find the best age-appropriate examples to use in the classroom, at home, or during your everyday routine .

In fact, there’s no question about it. Critical thinking is important for kids. And adults too!

Good Questions For Kindergarten To Think Critically

Younger kids need more concrete questions. These critical thinking questions will help them use reasoning and think deeply, even when they are small.

1. How do you know if something was a good decision?

2. How are these two things similar?

3. What are the differences between _______ and _________?

4. How would you feel if __________?

This question is great for building empathy .

5. Who was the main character? Why do you say that?

6. When is ___________ a problem?

7. What is the problem?

8. Why is this a problem?

9. What did you notice about _________?

10. Do you think he/she sees this the same way you do? Why or why not?

11. Has this happened before?

12. Do you think it will happen again? Why do you think this?

13. What is your opinion about _________? Why?

14. Is this appropriate? Why or why not?

15. What do you think would happen if __________?

16. What caused this to happen?

17. Do you think the world would be better if __________?

18. If you were in charge, what would you do differently?

19. Where can you find out more about this?

20. What does ______ mean?

21. Do you agree?

22. Can you give me an example of ________?

23. How do you know?

24. How would you solve this problem?

25. What makes something weird? What makes something normal?

Questions For Students: Elementary Through Middle School

For this age of kids, use any of the examples above and try these more abstract critical thinking questions too.

26. What do you think was the turning point?

27. Is there evidence to support your opinion (or decision)?

28. What does the evidence tell you?

29. What do you think would have been a better ending to… (book, movie, story)

30. When is the best time to start this?

31. When you think about solving a problem, where do you like to start?

32. What character/person changed the most? Why do you think this?

33. How could the author have created a thrilling twist in this story?

34. Who could help you with this? Why would they be a good fit to help?

35. Why is this important?

36. Why do you think ________ said that?

37. Why did the __________ (author, speaker) write/say this?

38. How does an idea grow? Or how does someone get from being a beginner to being an expert?

39. Do you think that what happened is what they meant to happen?

(Often, results are different than what people first think they will be.)

40. What can you use to help you decide?

41. What are the pros and cons of this?

42. Why is this happening?

43. What is the main message from this? (Or the lesson learned?)

44. What would you ask the author (speaker, etc.) if you could?

45. Do you have any questions about this?

46. Do you think it is too good to be true?

47. Can you defend these actions?

48. Compare this with this.

49. What would the world be like if ________? (kids were in charge, the sun was farther away, etc.)

50. Do you think there is a better alternative?

51. Is this person trustworthy? Why or why not?

52. At what age does someone stop being a kid? Why?

53. Can you see why someone would agree or disagree?

54. How would this ________ benefit or help others?

55. How will you know if your idea worked?

56. What is wrong with this situation?

57. What is good in this situation?

58. If someone were to argue your point, what do you think they would say?

59. Why do you think the character/person did that?

60. Is this fact or opinion? How do you know?

61. Was this change for the better? Or did it make things worse?

62. Who is most likely to _________? Why?

63. What do you think are the consequences of this decision?

64. Do you think we are asking the right question(s)? What is a different question instead?

Related Posts:

• Best Thought-Provoking Questions
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• Philosophical Questions To Ponder With Kids

Critical Thinking Questions For High School & College Students

These critical thinking questions are more complex. They encourage abstract thinking, plus explore logic, ethics, and reasoning.

65. Why did you make that decision?

66. How did you get to that decision? What was your thought process?

67. What are the advantages of this?

68. What are the disadvantages of this?

69. How could we make this (project, paper, etc.) better?

70. What do you think the problem is….?

71. What do you think the best solution for this is? Why?

72. Could someone interpret this differently? How so?

73. How would you explain this to someone who doesn’t know anything about it?

74. What are a few alternative possibilities? Are any better than the others?

75. What are the short-term implications of this decision?

76. What are the long-term implications of this decision?

77. How would you achieve a big goal ?

78. (After they come up with a solution to something) Are there other possible ways to solve this problem?

79. How can you use the pros and cons to make a good decision?

80. Do you think when many people do something, it seems more “right,” even when it isn’t?

81. What are the potential risks to this decision?

82. What are the strengths of this argument?

83. What are the weaknesses of this argument?

84. Where is this lacking in evidence?

85. What can this story teach us about life?

86. Where would this solution work? Where would it not work?

87. Why do you think it is important to ask this question?

88. Why are new ideas important in our society?

89. What do you think that character’s motive is?

90. When should you reevaluate your initial thoughts/decision?

91. Do you think this is an important issue?

92. What do you think should have happened instead?

93. What is the counterargument?

94. Why is this relevant?

95. Do you think ________ will ever happen?

96. If it does, who would it affect most? Why?

97. What assumptions are being made in this situation?

98. Is it ever ok to lie?

99. Why do you think this feels like __________?

100. How is this related to your values and beliefs?

• Best Topics To Discuss With Others
• Ice Breaker Questions To Get to Know Someone
• Best Questions To Ask Teens

Critical Thinking Questions For Adults

These are great for a conversation at home or at work interviews to see how well potential candidates think on their feet.

101. Where do you see strengths?

102. Where do you think there are areas for improvement?

103. Why did these things help you in the long run?

104. What information do you need to find out before making a good decision?

105. If you could sit down and have dinner with anyone in the world, who would it be? Why?

106. What would you say to this person?

107. Should others care about this? Why?

108. When should you ask for help?

109. Who will benefit most from this decision?

110. Who will benefit least from this decision?

111. Have we considered all the options?

112. What questions do you have?

113. Are there any biases that you think are playing out here?

114. Are you making an assumption about __________?

115. When will you see your results?

116. Where do you often find this type of problem? Why?

117. In your opinion, what caused ____________ to happen?

118. Was it avoidable?

119. Does anything concern you about this?

120. When is this acceptable?

121. When is this not acceptable (or appropriate)?

122. What is one thing that would have changed everything?

123. When do you think this will benefit _________ (the company, society, etc.)?

124. When a disagreement happens at work, what do you do?

125. Is this goal achievable ?

126. How does your work experience help you fill this role?

127. Has this ever been done before? When?

128. What would need to happen for you to reconsider?

129. When will we need this?

130. What skills fit well with this position?

Related: Fun Rapid Fire Questions To Ask

Examples of Kids Critical Thinking Questions: By Word

Another way to split up your critical thinking questions is by word.

• Who is most directly affected by this decision?
• Who is the protagonist? Who is the antagonist?
• Who was the most important character?
• Who was a supporting character that was essential to the storyline?
• What is the problem you are trying to solve?
• What information is important to know about this before forming an opinion?
• What was the point of _________?
• When is it a good time to stop (or take a breather)?
• When should you know the answer?
• When will it be time for this? How do you know?
• When will this be critical?

• Where can you go to ask for help?
• Where can you find a good solution? Or information that helps you solve this problem?
• Where could this idea lead?
• Why has this issue come out into the spotlight?
• Why do you think ______ acts that way?
• Why is _______ happening, but ________ is not?
• How else could we have done that?
• How else could this be handled?
• How would you have responded in this situation?
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• Best Family Challenge Ideas

More Ways To Encourage Critical Thinking In Kids

Want to go beyond questions? No problem! Here are other practical ways to build this crucial skill:

Change your questions to them.

Turn your normal yes or no questions to more open ended questions.

Example: Instead of “How was your day?” go with “What was the most interesting part of your school day today?”

Refrain from stepping in.

These days parents feel like they should be fixing their kids’ problems constantly.

Instead, hold back and force your child to problem-solve on their own. Ask questions and guide them through the problem, but let them know that they are in charge of finding their own solutions.

Play Games And Do Activities That Promote Critical Thinking

Here are a few great ones!

Two Truths & A Lie Game – The players have to decide which statements are true and which one is not. This game is great for learning to read body language too!

Good Debate Topics For Kids – Nothing builds quick critical thinking like a lively debate.

Riddles: What Am I? – These word riddles help kids think through different possibilities.

Guess The Animal Riddles for Kids – More riddles all about animals to get kids thinking.

Encourage creativity.

Provide your child with opportunities to use their imagination.

Sometimes, all this takes is getting your child off screens and outside playing with sticks!

Encourage them to build something , make up a new game, and think outside the box whenever possible.

Let them fiddle with things.

My son has a very “why” brain and loves to mess with stuff. It used to embarrass me when we were around others.

But, one day, my husband and I realized that his “working things out” isn’t bad. We just needed to teach him in what context it is appropriate. Now he fiddles with everything, and it is amazing to watch his mind work.

Let them question.

The same goes for questions. They should be challenging assumptions and questioning the world around them. Too many people take for granted the things that they hear and read. Teach your child to be different.

Promote Active Listening.

Encourage your child to ask questions to clarify understanding and develop communication skills.

Examples: “What I hear is _________.” Or, “How do you know _________?”

Try New Things.

Travel. And regularly expose your kids to new ideas and experiences. This helps them see their regular world in a new light.

Think Critically Yourself.

Finally, your child will be much more likely to think critically if they see a parent who does it. So, apply all of these strategies to yourself as well.

To Consider With Critical Thinking Questions For Kids

Teaching children to form their own opinions is how we build a generation of people that will analyze, evaluate, and make decisions for the betterment of the world.

It’s not just important. It’s critical to our future as a society.

More family-friendly posts you’ll love…

• Telephone Game Phrases & Statement Ideas
• Ice Breaker Kids & Teen Games
• Best Books List For 4 Year Olds

Creative Kids Critical Thinking Questions For Students

Jennifer is the founder and chief editor of Healthy Happy Impactful®. She believes that living, loving, and connecting deeply are the foundation for a good life. She holds a degree in education and is a mom to 3 kids.

41+ Critical Thinking Examples (Definition + Practices)

Critical thinking is an essential skill in our information-overloaded world, where figuring out what is fact and fiction has become increasingly challenging.

But why is critical thinking essential? Put, critical thinking empowers us to make better decisions, challenge and validate our beliefs and assumptions, and understand and interact with the world more effectively and meaningfully.

Critical thinking is like using your brain's "superpowers" to make smart choices. Whether it's picking the right insurance, deciding what to do in a job, or discussing topics in school, thinking deeply helps a lot. In the next parts, we'll share real-life examples of when this superpower comes in handy and give you some fun exercises to practice it.

Critical Thinking Process Outline

Critical thinking means thinking clearly and fairly without letting personal feelings get in the way. It's like being a detective, trying to solve a mystery by using clues and thinking hard about them.

It isn't always easy to think critically, as it can take a pretty smart person to see some of the questions that aren't being answered in a certain situation. But, we can train our brains to think more like puzzle solvers, which can help develop our critical thinking skills.

Here's what it looks like step by step:

Spotting the Problem: It's like discovering a puzzle to solve. You see that there's something you need to figure out or decide.

Collecting Clues: Now, you need to gather information. Maybe you read about it, watch a video, talk to people, or do some research. It's like getting all the pieces to solve your puzzle.

Breaking It Down: This is where you look at all your clues and try to see how they fit together. You're asking questions like: Why did this happen? What could happen next?

Checking Your Clues: You want to make sure your information is good. This means seeing if what you found out is true and if you can trust where it came from.

Making a Guess: After looking at all your clues, you think about what they mean and come up with an answer. This answer is like your best guess based on what you know.

Explaining Your Thoughts: Now, you tell others how you solved the puzzle. You explain how you thought about it and how you answered. 

Checking Your Work: This is like looking back and seeing if you missed anything. Did you make any mistakes? Did you let any personal feelings get in the way? This step helps make sure your thinking is clear and fair.

And remember, you might sometimes need to go back and redo some steps if you discover something new. If you realize you missed an important clue, you might have to go back and collect more information.

Critical Thinking Methods

Just like doing push-ups or running helps our bodies get stronger, there are special exercises that help our brains think better. These brain workouts push us to think harder, look at things closely, and ask many questions.

It's not always about finding the "right" answer. Instead, it's about the journey of thinking and asking "why" or "how." Doing these exercises often helps us become better thinkers and makes us curious to know more about the world.

Now, let's look at some brain workouts to help us think better:

1. "What If" Scenarios

Imagine crazy things happening, like, "What if there was no internet for a month? What would we do?" These games help us think of new and different ideas.

Pick a hot topic. Argue one side of it and then try arguing the opposite. This makes us see different viewpoints and think deeply about a topic.

3. Analyze Visual Data

Check out charts or pictures with lots of numbers and info but no explanations. What story are they telling? This helps us get better at understanding information just by looking at it.

4. Mind Mapping

Write an idea in the center and then draw lines to related ideas. It's like making a map of your thoughts. This helps us see how everything is connected.

There's lots of mind-mapping software , but it's also nice to do this by hand.

5. Weekly Diary

Every week, write about what happened, the choices you made, and what you learned. Writing helps us think about our actions and how we can do better.

6. Evaluating Information Sources

Collect stories or articles about one topic from newspapers or blogs. Which ones are trustworthy? Which ones might be a little biased? This teaches us to be smart about where we get our info.

There are many resources to help you determine if information sources are factual or not.

7. Socratic Questioning

This way of thinking is called the Socrates Method, named after an old-time thinker from Greece. It's about asking lots of questions to understand a topic. You can do this by yourself or chat with a friend.

Start with a Big Question:

"What does 'success' mean?"

Dive Deeper with More Questions:

"Why do you think of success that way?" "Do TV shows, friends, or family make you think that?" "Does everyone think about success the same way?"

"Can someone be a winner even if they aren't rich or famous?" "Can someone feel like they didn't succeed, even if everyone else thinks they did?"

Look for Real-life Examples:

"Who is someone you think is successful? Why?" "Was there a time you felt like a winner? What happened?"

Think About Other People's Views:

"How might a person from another country think about success?" "Does the idea of success change as we grow up or as our life changes?"

Think About What It Means:

"How does your idea of success shape what you want in life?" "Are there problems with only wanting to be rich or famous?"

Look Back and Think:

"After talking about this, did your idea of success change? How?" "Did you learn something new about what success means?"

8. Six Thinking Hats 

Edward de Bono came up with a cool way to solve problems by thinking in six different ways, like wearing different colored hats. You can do this independently, but it might be more effective in a group so everyone can have a different hat color. Each color has its way of thinking:

White Hat (Facts): Just the facts! Ask, "What do we know? What do we need to find out?"

Red Hat (Feelings): Talk about feelings. Ask, "How do I feel about this?"

Black Hat (Careful Thinking): Be cautious. Ask, "What could go wrong?"

Yellow Hat (Positive Thinking): Look on the bright side. Ask, "What's good about this?"

Green Hat (Creative Thinking): Think of new ideas. Ask, "What's another way to look at this?"

Blue Hat (Planning): Organize the talk. Ask, "What should we do next?"

When using this method with a group:

• Explain all the hats.
• Decide which hat to wear first.
• Make sure everyone switches hats at the same time.
• Finish with the Blue Hat to plan the next steps.

9. SWOT Analysis

SWOT Analysis is like a game plan for businesses to know where they stand and where they should go. "SWOT" stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.

There are a lot of SWOT templates out there for how to do this visually, but you can also think it through. It doesn't just apply to businesses but can be a good way to decide if a project you're working on is working.

Strengths: What's working well? Ask, "What are we good at?"

Weaknesses: Where can we do better? Ask, "Where can we improve?"

Opportunities: What good things might come our way? Ask, "What chances can we grab?"

Threats: What challenges might we face? Ask, "What might make things tough for us?"

Steps to do a SWOT Analysis:

• Goal: Decide what you want to find out.
• Research: Learn about your business and the world around it.
• Brainstorm: Get a group and think together. Talk about strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
• Pick the Most Important Points: Some things might be more urgent or important than others.
• Make a Plan: Decide what to do based on your SWOT list.
• Check Again Later: Things change, so look at your SWOT again after a while to update it.

Now that you have a few tools for thinking critically, let’s get into some specific examples.

Everyday Examples

Life is a series of decisions. From the moment we wake up, we're faced with choices – some trivial, like choosing a breakfast cereal, and some more significant, like buying a home or confronting an ethical dilemma at work. While it might seem that these decisions are disparate, they all benefit from the application of critical thinking.

10. Deciding to buy something

Imagine you want a new phone. Don't just buy it because the ad looks cool. Think about what you need in a phone. Look up different phones and see what people say about them. Choose the one that's the best deal for what you want.

11. Deciding what is true

There's a lot of news everywhere. Don't believe everything right away. Think about why someone might be telling you this. Check if what you're reading or watching is true. Make up your mind after you've looked into it.

12. Deciding when you’re wrong

Sometimes, friends can have disagreements. Don't just get mad right away. Try to see where they're coming from. Talk about what's going on. Find a way to fix the problem that's fair for everyone.

13. Deciding what to eat

There's always a new diet or exercise that's popular. Don't just follow it because it's trendy. Find out if it's good for you. Ask someone who knows, like a doctor. Make choices that make you feel good and stay healthy.

14. Deciding what to do today

Everyone is busy with school, chores, and hobbies. Make a list of things you need to do. Decide which ones are most important. Plan your day so you can get things done and still have fun.

15. Making Tough Choices

Sometimes, it's hard to know what's right. Think about how each choice will affect you and others. Talk to people you trust about it. Choose what feels right in your heart and is fair to others.

16. Planning for the Future

Big decisions, like where to go to school, can be tricky. Think about what you want in the future. Look at the good and bad of each choice. Talk to people who know about it. Pick what feels best for your dreams and goals.

Job Examples

17. solving problems.

Workers brainstorm ways to fix a machine quickly without making things worse when a machine breaks at a factory.

18. Decision Making

A store manager decides which products to order more of based on what's selling best.

19. Setting Goals

A team leader helps their team decide what tasks are most important to finish this month and which can wait.

20. Evaluating Ideas

At a team meeting, everyone shares ideas for a new project. The group discusses each idea's pros and cons before picking one.

21. Handling Conflict

Two workers disagree on how to do a job. Instead of arguing, they talk calmly, listen to each other, and find a solution they both like.

22. Improving Processes

A cashier thinks of a faster way to ring up items so customers don't have to wait as long.

23. Asking Questions

Before starting a big task, an employee asks for clear instructions and checks if they have the necessary tools.

24. Checking Facts

Before presenting a report, someone double-checks all their information to make sure there are no mistakes.

25. Planning for the Future

A business owner thinks about what might happen in the next few years, like new competitors or changes in what customers want, and makes plans based on those thoughts.

26. Understanding Perspectives

A team is designing a new toy. They think about what kids and parents would both like instead of just what they think is fun.

School Examples

27. researching a topic.

For a history project, a student looks up different sources to understand an event from multiple viewpoints.

28. Debating an Issue

In a class discussion, students pick sides on a topic, like school uniforms, and share reasons to support their views.

29. Evaluating Sources

While writing an essay, a student checks if the information from a website is trustworthy or might be biased.

30. Problem Solving in Math

When stuck on a tricky math problem, a student tries different methods to find the answer instead of giving up.

31. Analyzing Literature

In English class, students discuss why a character in a book made certain choices and what those decisions reveal about them.

32. Testing a Hypothesis

For a science experiment, students guess what will happen and then conduct tests to see if they're right or wrong.

33. Giving Peer Feedback

After reading a classmate's essay, a student offers suggestions for improving it.

34. Questioning Assumptions

In a geography lesson, students consider why certain countries are called "developed" and what that label means.

35. Designing a Study

For a psychology project, students plan an experiment to understand how people's memories work and think of ways to ensure accurate results.

36. Interpreting Data

In a science class, students look at charts and graphs from a study, then discuss what the information tells them and if there are any patterns.

Critical Thinking Puzzles

Not all scenarios will have a single correct answer that can be figured out by thinking critically. Sometimes we have to think critically about ethical choices or moral behaviors. 

Here are some mind games and scenarios you can solve using critical thinking. You can see the solution(s) at the end of the post.

37. The Farmer, Fox, Chicken, and Grain Problem

A farmer is at a riverbank with a fox, a chicken, and a grain bag. He needs to get all three items across the river. However, his boat can only carry himself and one of the three items at a time. 

Here's the challenge:

• If the fox is left alone with the chicken, the fox will eat the chicken.
• If the chicken is left alone with the grain, the chicken will eat the grain.

How can the farmer get all three items across the river without any item being eaten? 

38. The Rope, Jar, and Pebbles Problem

You are in a room with two long ropes hanging from the ceiling. Each rope is just out of arm's reach from the other, so you can't hold onto one rope and reach the other simultaneously. 

Your task is to tie the two rope ends together, but you can't move the position where they hang from the ceiling.

You are given a jar full of pebbles. How do you complete the task?

39. The Two Guards Problem

Imagine there are two doors. One door leads to certain doom, and the other leads to freedom. You don't know which is which.

In front of each door stands a guard. One guard always tells the truth. The other guard always lies. You don't know which guard is which.

You can ask only one question to one of the guards. What question should you ask to find the door that leads to freedom?

40. The Hourglass Problem

You have two hourglasses. One measures 7 minutes when turned over, and the other measures 4 minutes. Using just these hourglasses, how can you time exactly 9 minutes?

41. The Lifeboat Dilemma

Imagine you're on a ship that's sinking. You get on a lifeboat, but it's already too full and might flip over. 

Nearby in the water, five people are struggling: a scientist close to finding a cure for a sickness, an old couple who've been together for a long time, a mom with three kids waiting at home, and a tired teenager who helped save others but is now in danger. 

You can only save one person without making the boat flip. Who would you choose?

42. The Tech Dilemma

You work at a tech company and help make a computer program to help small businesses. You're almost ready to share it with everyone, but you find out there might be a small chance it has a problem that could show users' private info. 

If you decide to fix it, you must wait two more months before sharing it. But your bosses want you to share it now. What would you do?

43. The History Mystery

Dr. Amelia is a history expert. She's studying where a group of people traveled long ago. She reads old letters and documents to learn about it. But she finds some letters that tell a different story than what most people believe. 

If she says this new story is true, it could change what people learn in school and what they think about history. What should she do?

The Role of Bias in Critical Thinking

Have you ever decided you don’t like someone before you even know them? Or maybe someone shared an idea with you that you immediately loved without even knowing all the details. 

This experience is called bias, which occurs when you like or dislike something or someone without a good reason or knowing why. It can also take shape in certain reactions to situations, like a habit or instinct. 

Bias comes from our own experiences, what friends or family tell us, or even things we are born believing. Sometimes, bias can help us stay safe, but other times it stops us from seeing the truth.

Not all bias is bad. Bias can be a mechanism for assessing our potential safety in a new situation. If we are biased to think that anything long, thin, and curled up is a snake, we might assume the rope is something to be afraid of before we know it is just a rope.

While bias might serve us in some situations (like jumping out of the way of an actual snake before we have time to process that we need to be jumping out of the way), it often harms our ability to think critically.

How Bias Gets in the Way of Good Thinking

Selective Perception: We only notice things that match our ideas and ignore the rest. 

It's like only picking red candies from a mixed bowl because you think they taste the best, but they taste the same as every other candy in the bowl. It could also be when we see all the signs that our partner is cheating on us but choose to ignore them because we are happy the way we are (or at least, we think we are).

Agreeing with Yourself: This is called “ confirmation bias ” when we only listen to ideas that match our own and seek, interpret, and remember information in a way that confirms what we already think we know or believe. 

An example is when someone wants to know if it is safe to vaccinate their children but already believes that vaccines are not safe, so they only look for information supporting the idea that vaccines are bad.

Thinking We Know It All: Similar to confirmation bias, this is called “overconfidence bias.” Sometimes we think our ideas are the best and don't listen to others. This can stop us from learning.

Have you ever met someone who you consider a “know it”? Probably, they have a lot of overconfidence bias because while they may know many things accurately, they can’t know everything. Still, if they act like they do, they show overconfidence bias.

There's a weird kind of bias similar to this called the Dunning Kruger Effect, and that is when someone is bad at what they do, but they believe and act like they are the best .

Following the Crowd: This is formally called “groupthink”. It's hard to speak up with a different idea if everyone agrees. But this can lead to mistakes.

An example of this we’ve all likely seen is the cool clique in primary school. There is usually one person that is the head of the group, the “coolest kid in school”, and everyone listens to them and does what they want, even if they don’t think it’s a good idea.

How to Overcome Biases

Here are a few ways to learn to think better, free from our biases (or at least aware of them!).

Know Your Biases: Realize that everyone has biases. If we know about them, we can think better.

Listen to Different People: Talking to different kinds of people can give us new ideas.

Ask Why: Always ask yourself why you believe something. Is it true, or is it just a bias?

Understand Others: Try to think about how others feel. It helps you see things in new ways.

Keep Learning: Always be curious and open to new information.

In today's world, everything changes fast, and there's so much information everywhere. This makes critical thinking super important. It helps us distinguish between what's real and what's made up. It also helps us make good choices. But thinking this way can be tough sometimes because of biases. These are like sneaky thoughts that can trick us. The good news is we can learn to see them and think better.

There are cool tools and ways we've talked about, like the "Socratic Questioning" method and the "Six Thinking Hats." These tools help us get better at thinking. These thinking skills can also help us in school, work, and everyday life.

We’ve also looked at specific scenarios where critical thinking would be helpful, such as deciding what diet to follow and checking facts.

Thinking isn't just a skill—it's a special talent we improve over time. Working on it lets us see things more clearly and understand the world better. So, keep practicing and asking questions! It'll make you a smarter thinker and help you see the world differently.

Critical Thinking Puzzles (Solutions)

The farmer, fox, chicken, and grain problem.

• The farmer first takes the chicken across the river and leaves it on the other side.
• He returns to the original side and takes the fox across the river.
• After leaving the fox on the other side, he returns the chicken to the starting side.
• He leaves the chicken on the starting side and takes the grain bag across the river.
• He leaves the grain with the fox on the other side and returns to get the chicken.
• The farmer takes the chicken across, and now all three items -- the fox, the chicken, and the grain -- are safely on the other side of the river.

The Rope, Jar, and Pebbles Problem

• Take one rope and tie the jar of pebbles to its end.
• Swing the rope with the jar in a pendulum motion.
• While the rope is swinging, grab the other rope and wait.
• As the swinging rope comes back within reach due to its pendulum motion, grab it.
• With both ropes within reach, untie the jar and tie the rope ends together.

The Two Guards Problem

The question is, "What would the other guard say is the door to doom?" Then choose the opposite door.

The Hourglass Problem

• Start both hourglasses. 
• When the 4-minute hourglass runs out, turn it over.
• When the 7-minute hourglass runs out, the 4-minute hourglass will have been running for 3 minutes. Turn the 7-minute hourglass over. 
• When the 4-minute hourglass runs out for the second time (a total of 8 minutes have passed), the 7-minute hourglass will run for 1 minute. Turn the 7-minute hourglass again for 1 minute to empty the hourglass (a total of 9 minutes passed).

The Boat and Weights Problem

Take the cat over first and leave it on the other side. Then, return and take the fish across next. When you get there, take the cat back with you. Leave the cat on the starting side and take the cat food across. Lastly, return to get the cat and bring it to the other side.

The Lifeboat Dilemma

There isn’t one correct answer to this problem. Here are some elements to consider:

• Moral Principles: What values guide your decision? Is it the potential greater good for humanity (the scientist)? What is the value of long-standing love and commitment (the elderly couple)? What is the future of young children who depend on their mothers? Or the selfless bravery of the teenager?
• Future Implications: Consider the future consequences of each choice. Saving the scientist might benefit millions in the future, but what moral message does it send about the value of individual lives?
• Emotional vs. Logical Thinking: While it's essential to engage empathy, it's also crucial not to let emotions cloud judgment entirely. For instance, while the teenager's bravery is commendable, does it make him more deserving of a spot on the boat than the others?
• Acknowledging Uncertainty: The scientist claims to be close to a significant breakthrough, but there's no certainty. How does this uncertainty factor into your decision?
• Personal Bias: Recognize and challenge any personal biases, such as biases towards age, profession, or familial status.

The Tech Dilemma

Again, there isn’t one correct answer to this problem. Here are some elements to consider:

• Evaluate the Risk: How severe is the potential vulnerability? Can it be easily exploited, or would it require significant expertise? Even if the circumstances are rare, what would be the consequences if the vulnerability were exploited?
• Stakeholder Considerations: Different stakeholders will have different priorities. Upper management might prioritize financial projections, the marketing team might be concerned about the product's reputation, and customers might prioritize the security of their data. How do you balance these competing interests?
• Short-Term vs. Long-Term Implications: While launching on time could meet immediate financial goals, consider the potential long-term damage to the company's reputation if the vulnerability is exploited. Would the short-term gains be worth the potential long-term costs?
• Ethical Implications : Beyond the financial and reputational aspects, there's an ethical dimension to consider. Is it right to release a product with a known vulnerability, even if the chances of it being exploited are low?
• Seek External Input: Consulting with cybersecurity experts outside your company might be beneficial. They could provide a more objective risk assessment and potential mitigation strategies.
• Communication: How will you communicate the decision, whatever it may be, both internally to your team and upper management and externally to your customers and potential users?

The History Mystery

Dr. Amelia should take the following steps:

• Verify the Letters: Before making any claims, she should check if the letters are actual and not fake. She can do this by seeing when and where they were written and if they match with other things from that time.
• Get a Second Opinion: It's always good to have someone else look at what you've found. Dr. Amelia could show the letters to other history experts and see their thoughts.
• Research More: Maybe there are more documents or letters out there that support this new story. Dr. Amelia should keep looking to see if she can find more evidence.
• Share the Findings: If Dr. Amelia believes the letters are true after all her checks, she should tell others. This can be through books, talks, or articles.
• Stay Open to Feedback: Some people might agree with Dr. Amelia, and others might not. She should listen to everyone and be ready to learn more or change her mind if new information arises.

Ultimately, Dr. Amelia's job is to find out the truth about history and share it. It's okay if this new truth differs from what people used to believe. History is about learning from the past, no matter the story.

Related posts:

• Experimenter Bias (Definition + Examples)
• Hasty Generalization Fallacy (31 Examples + Similar Names)
• Ad Hoc Fallacy (29 Examples + Other Names)
• Confirmation Bias (Examples + Definition)
• Equivocation Fallacy (26 Examples + Description)

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16 Critical Thinking Questions For Students

Critical thinking is an essential skill that empowers students to think critically and make informed decisions. It encourages them to explore different perspectives, analyze information, and develop logical reasoning. To foster critical thinking skills, it is crucial to ask students thought-provoking questions that challenge their assumptions and encourage deeper analysis. Here are 16 critical thinking questions for students to enhance their problem-solving abilities:

• What evidence supports this argument?
• Can you identify any biases in this article?
• How does this relate to what we have learned previously?
• What alternative solutions can you propose to this problem?
• How might different cultures perceive this situation?
• What assumptions underlie this theory?
• How reliable is the source of this information?
• Can you identify any logical fallacies in this argument?
• What impact does this decision have on various stakeholders?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of this argument?
• How might you approach this problem differently?
• Wha t ethical considerations need to be taken into account?
• Can you identify any gaps in the evidence provided?
• How does this concept apply to real-world situations?
• What are the potential consequences of this decision?
• How might you evaluate the credibility of this research?

By incorporating these critical thinking questions, educators can help students develop essential skills such as analyzing information, evaluating arguments, and problem-solving. Encouraging students to think critically will not only benefit their academic performance but also prepare them for success in various aspects of their lives.

Remember, critical thinking is a skill that can be nurtured and strengthened with practice. By guiding students to ask and answer these thought-provoking questions, educators can create a learning environment that fosters independent thinking and creativity.

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Critical Thinking Questions That Will Blow Your Mind

• February 10, 2018

What would it be like if every decision you made didn’t involve your personal feelings or over-emotional reactions? What if your perspective was always balanced and decisions completely informed? Is it not time that you used critical thinking questions to become the more levelheaded, cool, and calm person you want to be?

Being a critical thinker enables you to take a neutral perspective on an idea or scenario and gives you the power of true choice. Being free from manipulation or emotional ties to your decision will allow you to make the most beneficial choice in any circumstance.

In critical thinking, we are taught to question everything. However, the question behind the question is; what questions should you be asking? Before we go into the critical matter of the exact questions, we should first look at the manner in which these critical thinking questions should be asked. After this article, you will be a wizard at asking critical thinking questions. 

The Standard of Questions You Should Ask

Although the actual questions will be very important to critical thinking, the emphasis and purpose of these questions will determine how effective the questions will be. You must first know how to question before you know what and which critical thinking questions to ask.

1. Open-ended questioning

As a critical thinker, you cannot allow whomever or whatever you are questioning to give you the smallest amount of information for your questions. Yes or No answers can really drag out the process of getting the answers and information that you want.

Asking questions that will not only give you the answers you are looking for but also open up a heap more information than you were searching for. Ask open-ended questions such as the following:

• “What is the purpose of this scenario?”  Instead of:  “Is this the purpose of this scenario?”
• “What is your favorite thing about this scenario?” Instead of: “Is this your favorite thing about this scenario?”

2. Avoid leading questions

Being a critical thinker is about escaping your bias and seeing things outside of your personal perspective . It is thus very important to avoid leading the question, in an area you want it to go.

Keep your questions as neutral as possible and don’t allow any definitive language to creep into the question. Such as using the following:

• “What is your take on the healthiest diet there is?”  Instead of: “Don’t you think the vegan diet is the healthiest diet?”
• “What is the condition of the country at the moment?”  Instead of: “How bad is the condition of the country at the moment?”

3. Specify the boundaries of your questions

As much as leading a question can be a hindrance to what you want, so can leaving the question too open, and invite unnecessary information to be given. Critical thinking is about being objective, but it still needs a direction and focus in which you apply your critical thinking.

Make sure that you set up an accurate framework in which your questions can be answered. Being too broad makes the process of getting answers inefficient and drawn out. Try asking questions like:

• “Who is your favorite male tennis player in the United States?”  Instead of: “Who is your favorite tennis player?”
• “If you could live anywhere in South East Asia, where would that be?”  Instead of: “If you could live anywhere, where would that be?”

4. Funnel the questions until you get the answer you were looking for

When questions remain shallow, it is easy for the sources of information you are questioning to mislead and avoid giving you the information that you want.

Do not set up the path of questions beforehand, but rather make sure that you dig deeper after each question in the direction of information that you really want.  Once you have your answer, then move back to broader questioning in order to get a better picture of the whole once again.

5. All the answers to your question must be based on facts and well supported from many different sources

Make sure that you don’t give into hearsay. Find the studies, the science, and ample testimonials before you accept the information that you have been given.

Look into many different and unrelated sources to see if the information matches up. Look at the other side of the argument and validate their claims.

Methods of Critical Thinking Questions

1. the 5 w’s and the h.

These are the absolute basics of critical thinking. The Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How are foundational questions that are taught over and over in journalism, investigation, and research.

They are the base from which every critical analysis should be created. You would apply these questions as follows:

•    …would benefit?
•    …would this harm?
•    …is responsible?
•    …has researched this before?
•    …is the other perspective?
•    …would be the challenges?
•    …are the strengths?
•    …is the key subject?
•    …would this problem reside?
•    …are there similar situations?
•    …can more information be found?
•    …can this be improved on?
•    …is this acceptable and unacceptable?
•    …could this be implemented?
•    …would we be able to measure the results?
•    …is it time to stop this action?
•    …is this a problem?
•    …is this relevant?
•    …should this be known about?
•    …is there a need for this?
•    …is this different from anything else similar to it?
•    …it functions?
•    … is this the truth about it?
•    …could it harm anyone?

2. Agenda and method questioning

These two areas of questioning may have already been covered through the 5 W’s and the H. However, it is beneficial to emphasize the angle from which this questioning comes.

The first one is questioning the agenda. This is aimed at figuring out how people could benefit from a situation or idea. This agenda can place all the information received in context.

For instance, if a company was contributing to a charity and their agenda was to improve their image against the damage done by that company, then the contributions would be much less charitable and much more about publicity.

Questions that would help clarify the agenda would be:

• What is the person or organization involved trying to accomplish?
• What issues or problems are raised by the person or organization involved?
• What data, what experiences, what evidence is given?
• Is the person or organization involved thinking about the environment?
• Is the person’s or organization’s thinking justified as far as we can see from our perspective?
• And how do they justify it from their perspective?
• How can we enter their perspective to appreciate what they have to say?

The second aspect of this is questioning the method. As a critical thinker, this makes the outcomes of every situation and idea questionable, which is exactly the point of critical thinking.

Too many times the outcome of a specific method is the focus of debate, without clarifying if that outcome has validity.

Questions that would help clarify the Method would be:

•   I s the person or organization involved willing to fundamentally rethink their methods of creating a certain outcome?
•  Has the person or organization involved thought about how the method will work going into the future?
•  To what extent has the method been tested?
•  Is there any other method that could be used to produce this outcome and what would be the implications of this method?
•  Is the person or organization involved willing to allow this method to be tested?
•  In what other situation has this method been used and how effective was it?

3. Inquiry process

The inquiry process is exactly that; a process. It does entail certain questions but the power of this process resides in the way the process is conducted.

This process is the standard of research and creates an order in which you can follow, uncovering the information that you seek. Although the terminology may change for each step of the process, the essence of what needs to be done remains the same.

The process is divided as follows:

•     Ask (Pose Question)
•    Investigate (Find Resources)
•    Create (interpret/ Synthesise)
•    Discuss (Report findings)
•    Reflect (follow the process backward)

4. Bloom’s taxonomy

Bloom’s taxonomy was created by Dr. Benjamin Bloom , a psychologist in the 1950’s. Bloom’s work was to create a better form of learning through more focus on analysis and evaluation.

Bloom’s taxonomy is very much Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to critical thinking. The original Bloom’s taxonomy encompasses:

•    What is the subject?
•    When did it happen?

Comprehension:

•    How would you compare the subject?
•    Explain the subject in your own words?

Application

•    What examples can you find of the subject?
•    What approach would you use to solve the problem?
•    What inference can you make from the information?
•    How would you classify or categorize the subject?
•    How would you compare the information?
•    What was the value or importance of the information?

Creation or Synthesis

•    Can you propose an alternative interpretation of the information?
•    What might happen if you…?

Bloom’s Taxonomy has since been revised. In 2001 a group of cognitive psychologists, curriculum theorists and instructional researchers, and testing and assessment specialists change the titles of each level to make a more dynamic approach to the system.

The titles were revised to:

•    Recognizing
•    Recalling
•    Interpreting
•    Exemplifying
•    Classifying
•    Summarizing
•    Inferring
•    Comparing
•    Explaining
•    Executing
•    Implementing
•    Differentiating
•    Organizing
•    Attributing
•    Checking
•    Critiquing
•    Generating
•    Planning
•    Producing

In the process of the revision, the authors broke the knowledge area into its own taxonomy:

Factual Knowledge

•    Knowledge of terminology
•    Knowledge of specific details and elements

Conceptual Knowledge

•    Knowledge of classifications and categories
•    Knowledge of principles and generalizations
•    Knowledge of theories, models, and structures

Procedural Knowledge

•    Knowledge of subject-specific skills and algorithms
•    Knowledge of subject-specific techniques and methods
•    Knowledge of criteria for determining when to use appropriate procedures

Metacognitive Knowledge

•    Strategic Knowledge
•    Knowledge about cognitive tasks, including appropriate contextual and conditional knowledge
•    Self-knowledge

If you want to know more about the reasoning behind the revision click here .

5. Integral questioning

Integral theory was created by Ken Wilber  (author of A Brief History of Everything ) and has become one of the most useful structures of evaluation in this era. The integral model is a reference structure in which you can objectively see all areas of a specific subject.

This method goes hand in glove with the practice of critical thinking. Applying the method into question form will bring out the following analysis:

Quadrants: this is the evaluation of each viewpoint of a certain subject.

•    What does a specific person involved think or feel about the subject?
•    What studies and tests have been done on the subject?
•    What do the people as a whole feel or think about the subject?
•    What does the industry of the subject say on the subject?

Lines: These are the areas of understanding of factors involved in the matter.

•    What are the different areas of life expressed in this subject?
•    What factors are involved in the situation or subject?
•    To what area of understanding does is the subject appeal to?

Levels: This deals with a hierarchical standard of a certain area of the subject.

•    To what level of understanding does is a subject appeal?
•    How complex or advanced is this subject?
•    What standard of knowledge needs to be obtained to understand this subject?

State: This refers to a fleeting state of being in which the subject can be seen in.

•    In what state of mind was the person involved in when reviewing the subject?
•    In what state of mind was the person involved in when the situation occurred?
•    Is the information given contextual to a certain situation?

Types: This is a division of experiences based on traits that could affect perspective.

•    How would someone who is completely different from the person involved perceive the situation?
•    What different types of people were involved in the situation?
•    How could this subject be received differently by a different cultural reference?

Question Everything

You now possess all that you need to start becoming a critical thinker and asking critical thinking questions. The only way to engrain the above processes and questions to become a critical thinker is to practice. You might need to refer to this article consistently at first, but after time you will become a natural and healthy critical thinker.

This video may help to ignite your passion for questioning everything:

Read more on critical thinking by checking out these related articles and resources:

• How to Solve the Biggest Problems With Critical Thinking
• Critical Thinking Examples That Wil Influence the World Around You

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Critical Thinking

Critical thinking is a widely accepted educational goal. Its definition is contested, but the competing definitions can be understood as differing conceptions of the same basic concept: careful thinking directed to a goal. Conceptions differ with respect to the scope of such thinking, the type of goal, the criteria and norms for thinking carefully, and the thinking components on which they focus. Its adoption as an educational goal has been recommended on the basis of respect for students’ autonomy and preparing students for success in life and for democratic citizenship. “Critical thinkers” have the dispositions and abilities that lead them to think critically when appropriate. The abilities can be identified directly; the dispositions indirectly, by considering what factors contribute to or impede exercise of the abilities. Standardized tests have been developed to assess the degree to which a person possesses such dispositions and abilities. Educational intervention has been shown experimentally to improve them, particularly when it includes dialogue, anchored instruction, and mentoring. Controversies have arisen over the generalizability of critical thinking across domains, over alleged bias in critical thinking theories and instruction, and over the relationship of critical thinking to other types of thinking.

2.1 Dewey’s Three Main Examples

2.2 dewey’s other examples, 2.3 further examples, 2.4 non-examples, 3. the definition of critical thinking, 4. its value, 5. the process of thinking critically, 6. components of the process, 7. contributory dispositions and abilities, 8.1 initiating dispositions, 8.2 internal dispositions, 9. critical thinking abilities, 10. required knowledge, 11. educational methods, 12.1 the generalizability of critical thinking, 12.2 bias in critical thinking theory and pedagogy, 12.3 relationship of critical thinking to other types of thinking, other internet resources, related entries.

Use of the term ‘critical thinking’ to describe an educational goal goes back to the American philosopher John Dewey (1910), who more commonly called it ‘reflective thinking’. He defined it as

active, persistent and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it, and the further conclusions to which it tends. (Dewey 1910: 6; 1933: 9)

and identified a habit of such consideration with a scientific attitude of mind. His lengthy quotations of Francis Bacon, John Locke, and John Stuart Mill indicate that he was not the first person to propose development of a scientific attitude of mind as an educational goal.

In the 1930s, many of the schools that participated in the Eight-Year Study of the Progressive Education Association (Aikin 1942) adopted critical thinking as an educational goal, for whose achievement the study’s Evaluation Staff developed tests (Smith, Tyler, & Evaluation Staff 1942). Glaser (1941) showed experimentally that it was possible to improve the critical thinking of high school students. Bloom’s influential taxonomy of cognitive educational objectives (Bloom et al. 1956) incorporated critical thinking abilities. Ennis (1962) proposed 12 aspects of critical thinking as a basis for research on the teaching and evaluation of critical thinking ability.

Since 1980, an annual international conference in California on critical thinking and educational reform has attracted tens of thousands of educators from all levels of education and from many parts of the world. Also since 1980, the state university system in California has required all undergraduate students to take a critical thinking course. Since 1983, the Association for Informal Logic and Critical Thinking has sponsored sessions in conjunction with the divisional meetings of the American Philosophical Association (APA). In 1987, the APA’s Committee on Pre-College Philosophy commissioned a consensus statement on critical thinking for purposes of educational assessment and instruction (Facione 1990a). Researchers have developed standardized tests of critical thinking abilities and dispositions; for details, see the Supplement on Assessment . Educational jurisdictions around the world now include critical thinking in guidelines for curriculum and assessment.

For details on this history, see the Supplement on History .

2. Examples and Non-Examples

Before considering the definition of critical thinking, it will be helpful to have in mind some examples of critical thinking, as well as some examples of kinds of thinking that would apparently not count as critical thinking.

Dewey (1910: 68–71; 1933: 91–94) takes as paradigms of reflective thinking three class papers of students in which they describe their thinking. The examples range from the everyday to the scientific.

Transit : “The other day, when I was down town on 16th Street, a clock caught my eye. I saw that the hands pointed to 12:20. This suggested that I had an engagement at 124th Street, at one o’clock. I reasoned that as it had taken me an hour to come down on a surface car, I should probably be twenty minutes late if I returned the same way. I might save twenty minutes by a subway express. But was there a station near? If not, I might lose more than twenty minutes in looking for one. Then I thought of the elevated, and I saw there was such a line within two blocks. But where was the station? If it were several blocks above or below the street I was on, I should lose time instead of gaining it. My mind went back to the subway express as quicker than the elevated; furthermore, I remembered that it went nearer than the elevated to the part of 124th Street I wished to reach, so that time would be saved at the end of the journey. I concluded in favor of the subway, and reached my destination by one o’clock.” (Dewey 1910: 68–69; 1933: 91–92)

Ferryboat : “Projecting nearly horizontally from the upper deck of the ferryboat on which I daily cross the river is a long white pole, having a gilded ball at its tip. It suggested a flagpole when I first saw it; its color, shape, and gilded ball agreed with this idea, and these reasons seemed to justify me in this belief. But soon difficulties presented themselves. The pole was nearly horizontal, an unusual position for a flagpole; in the next place, there was no pulley, ring, or cord by which to attach a flag; finally, there were elsewhere on the boat two vertical staffs from which flags were occasionally flown. It seemed probable that the pole was not there for flag-flying.

“I then tried to imagine all possible purposes of the pole, and to consider for which of these it was best suited: (a) Possibly it was an ornament. But as all the ferryboats and even the tugboats carried poles, this hypothesis was rejected. (b) Possibly it was the terminal of a wireless telegraph. But the same considerations made this improbable. Besides, the more natural place for such a terminal would be the highest part of the boat, on top of the pilot house. (c) Its purpose might be to point out the direction in which the boat is moving.

“In support of this conclusion, I discovered that the pole was lower than the pilot house, so that the steersman could easily see it. Moreover, the tip was enough higher than the base, so that, from the pilot’s position, it must appear to project far out in front of the boat. Moreover, the pilot being near the front of the boat, he would need some such guide as to its direction. Tugboats would also need poles for such a purpose. This hypothesis was so much more probable than the others that I accepted it. I formed the conclusion that the pole was set up for the purpose of showing the pilot the direction in which the boat pointed, to enable him to steer correctly.” (Dewey 1910: 69–70; 1933: 92–93)

Bubbles : “In washing tumblers in hot soapsuds and placing them mouth downward on a plate, bubbles appeared on the outside of the mouth of the tumblers and then went inside. Why? The presence of bubbles suggests air, which I note must come from inside the tumbler. I see that the soapy water on the plate prevents escape of the air save as it may be caught in bubbles. But why should air leave the tumbler? There was no substance entering to force it out. It must have expanded. It expands by increase of heat, or by decrease of pressure, or both. Could the air have become heated after the tumbler was taken from the hot suds? Clearly not the air that was already entangled in the water. If heated air was the cause, cold air must have entered in transferring the tumblers from the suds to the plate. I test to see if this supposition is true by taking several more tumblers out. Some I shake so as to make sure of entrapping cold air in them. Some I take out holding mouth downward in order to prevent cold air from entering. Bubbles appear on the outside of every one of the former and on none of the latter. I must be right in my inference. Air from the outside must have been expanded by the heat of the tumbler, which explains the appearance of the bubbles on the outside. But why do they then go inside? Cold contracts. The tumbler cooled and also the air inside it. Tension was removed, and hence bubbles appeared inside. To be sure of this, I test by placing a cup of ice on the tumbler while the bubbles are still forming outside. They soon reverse” (Dewey 1910: 70–71; 1933: 93–94).

Dewey (1910, 1933) sprinkles his book with other examples of critical thinking. We will refer to the following.

Weather : A man on a walk notices that it has suddenly become cool, thinks that it is probably going to rain, looks up and sees a dark cloud obscuring the sun, and quickens his steps (1910: 6–10; 1933: 9–13).

Disorder : A man finds his rooms on his return to them in disorder with his belongings thrown about, thinks at first of burglary as an explanation, then thinks of mischievous children as being an alternative explanation, then looks to see whether valuables are missing, and discovers that they are (1910: 82–83; 1933: 166–168).

Typhoid : A physician diagnosing a patient whose conspicuous symptoms suggest typhoid avoids drawing a conclusion until more data are gathered by questioning the patient and by making tests (1910: 85–86; 1933: 170).

Blur : A moving blur catches our eye in the distance, we ask ourselves whether it is a cloud of whirling dust or a tree moving its branches or a man signaling to us, we think of other traits that should be found on each of those possibilities, and we look and see if those traits are found (1910: 102, 108; 1933: 121, 133).

Suction pump : In thinking about the suction pump, the scientist first notes that it will draw water only to a maximum height of 33 feet at sea level and to a lesser maximum height at higher elevations, selects for attention the differing atmospheric pressure at these elevations, sets up experiments in which the air is removed from a vessel containing water (when suction no longer works) and in which the weight of air at various levels is calculated, compares the results of reasoning about the height to which a given weight of air will allow a suction pump to raise water with the observed maximum height at different elevations, and finally assimilates the suction pump to such apparently different phenomena as the siphon and the rising of a balloon (1910: 150–153; 1933: 195–198).

Diamond : A passenger in a car driving in a diamond lane reserved for vehicles with at least one passenger notices that the diamond marks on the pavement are far apart in some places and close together in others. Why? The driver suggests that the reason may be that the diamond marks are not needed where there is a solid double line separating the diamond lane from the adjoining lane, but are needed when there is a dotted single line permitting crossing into the diamond lane. Further observation confirms that the diamonds are close together when a dotted line separates the diamond lane from its neighbour, but otherwise far apart.

Rash : A woman suddenly develops a very itchy red rash on her throat and upper chest. She recently noticed a mark on the back of her right hand, but was not sure whether the mark was a rash or a scrape. She lies down in bed and thinks about what might be causing the rash and what to do about it. About two weeks before, she began taking blood pressure medication that contained a sulfa drug, and the pharmacist had warned her, in view of a previous allergic reaction to a medication containing a sulfa drug, to be on the alert for an allergic reaction; however, she had been taking the medication for two weeks with no such effect. The day before, she began using a new cream on her neck and upper chest; against the new cream as the cause was mark on the back of her hand, which had not been exposed to the cream. She began taking probiotics about a month before. She also recently started new eye drops, but she supposed that manufacturers of eye drops would be careful not to include allergy-causing components in the medication. The rash might be a heat rash, since she recently was sweating profusely from her upper body. Since she is about to go away on a short vacation, where she would not have access to her usual physician, she decides to keep taking the probiotics and using the new eye drops but to discontinue the blood pressure medication and to switch back to the old cream for her neck and upper chest. She forms a plan to consult her regular physician on her return about the blood pressure medication.

Candidate : Although Dewey included no examples of thinking directed at appraising the arguments of others, such thinking has come to be considered a kind of critical thinking. We find an example of such thinking in the performance task on the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA+), which its sponsoring organization describes as

a performance-based assessment that provides a measure of an institution’s contribution to the development of critical-thinking and written communication skills of its students. (Council for Aid to Education 2017)

A sample task posted on its website requires the test-taker to write a report for public distribution evaluating a fictional candidate’s policy proposals and their supporting arguments, using supplied background documents, with a recommendation on whether to endorse the candidate.

Immediate acceptance of an idea that suggests itself as a solution to a problem (e.g., a possible explanation of an event or phenomenon, an action that seems likely to produce a desired result) is “uncritical thinking, the minimum of reflection” (Dewey 1910: 13). On-going suspension of judgment in the light of doubt about a possible solution is not critical thinking (Dewey 1910: 108). Critique driven by a dogmatically held political or religious ideology is not critical thinking; thus Paulo Freire (1968 [1970]) is using the term (e.g., at 1970: 71, 81, 100, 146) in a more politically freighted sense that includes not only reflection but also revolutionary action against oppression. Derivation of a conclusion from given data using an algorithm is not critical thinking.

What is critical thinking? There are many definitions. Ennis (2016) lists 14 philosophically oriented scholarly definitions and three dictionary definitions. Following Rawls (1971), who distinguished his conception of justice from a utilitarian conception but regarded them as rival conceptions of the same concept, Ennis maintains that the 17 definitions are different conceptions of the same concept. Rawls articulated the shared concept of justice as

a characteristic set of principles for assigning basic rights and duties and for determining… the proper distribution of the benefits and burdens of social cooperation. (Rawls 1971: 5)

Bailin et al. (1999b) claim that, if one considers what sorts of thinking an educator would take not to be critical thinking and what sorts to be critical thinking, one can conclude that educators typically understand critical thinking to have at least three features.

• It is done for the purpose of making up one’s mind about what to believe or do.
• The person engaging in the thinking is trying to fulfill standards of adequacy and accuracy appropriate to the thinking.
• The thinking fulfills the relevant standards to some threshold level.

One could sum up the core concept that involves these three features by saying that critical thinking is careful goal-directed thinking. This core concept seems to apply to all the examples of critical thinking described in the previous section. As for the non-examples, their exclusion depends on construing careful thinking as excluding jumping immediately to conclusions, suspending judgment no matter how strong the evidence, reasoning from an unquestioned ideological or religious perspective, and routinely using an algorithm to answer a question.

If the core of critical thinking is careful goal-directed thinking, conceptions of it can vary according to its presumed scope, its presumed goal, one’s criteria and threshold for being careful, and the thinking component on which one focuses. As to its scope, some conceptions (e.g., Dewey 1910, 1933) restrict it to constructive thinking on the basis of one’s own observations and experiments, others (e.g., Ennis 1962; Fisher & Scriven 1997; Johnson 1992) to appraisal of the products of such thinking. Ennis (1991) and Bailin et al. (1999b) take it to cover both construction and appraisal. As to its goal, some conceptions restrict it to forming a judgment (Dewey 1910, 1933; Lipman 1987; Facione 1990a). Others allow for actions as well as beliefs as the end point of a process of critical thinking (Ennis 1991; Bailin et al. 1999b). As to the criteria and threshold for being careful, definitions vary in the term used to indicate that critical thinking satisfies certain norms: “intellectually disciplined” (Scriven & Paul 1987), “reasonable” (Ennis 1991), “skillful” (Lipman 1987), “skilled” (Fisher & Scriven 1997), “careful” (Bailin & Battersby 2009). Some definitions specify these norms, referring variously to “consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it and the further conclusions to which it tends” (Dewey 1910, 1933); “the methods of logical inquiry and reasoning” (Glaser 1941); “conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication” (Scriven & Paul 1987); the requirement that “it is sensitive to context, relies on criteria, and is self-correcting” (Lipman 1987); “evidential, conceptual, methodological, criteriological, or contextual considerations” (Facione 1990a); and “plus-minus considerations of the product in terms of appropriate standards (or criteria)” (Johnson 1992). Stanovich and Stanovich (2010) propose to ground the concept of critical thinking in the concept of rationality, which they understand as combining epistemic rationality (fitting one’s beliefs to the world) and instrumental rationality (optimizing goal fulfillment); a critical thinker, in their view, is someone with “a propensity to override suboptimal responses from the autonomous mind” (2010: 227). These variant specifications of norms for critical thinking are not necessarily incompatible with one another, and in any case presuppose the core notion of thinking carefully. As to the thinking component singled out, some definitions focus on suspension of judgment during the thinking (Dewey 1910; McPeck 1981), others on inquiry while judgment is suspended (Bailin & Battersby 2009, 2021), others on the resulting judgment (Facione 1990a), and still others on responsiveness to reasons (Siegel 1988). Kuhn (2019) takes critical thinking to be more a dialogic practice of advancing and responding to arguments than an individual ability.

In educational contexts, a definition of critical thinking is a “programmatic definition” (Scheffler 1960: 19). It expresses a practical program for achieving an educational goal. For this purpose, a one-sentence formulaic definition is much less useful than articulation of a critical thinking process, with criteria and standards for the kinds of thinking that the process may involve. The real educational goal is recognition, adoption and implementation by students of those criteria and standards. That adoption and implementation in turn consists in acquiring the knowledge, abilities and dispositions of a critical thinker.

Conceptions of critical thinking generally do not include moral integrity as part of the concept. Dewey, for example, took critical thinking to be the ultimate intellectual goal of education, but distinguished it from the development of social cooperation among school children, which he took to be the central moral goal. Ennis (1996, 2011) added to his previous list of critical thinking dispositions a group of dispositions to care about the dignity and worth of every person, which he described as a “correlative” (1996) disposition without which critical thinking would be less valuable and perhaps harmful. An educational program that aimed at developing critical thinking but not the correlative disposition to care about the dignity and worth of every person, he asserted, “would be deficient and perhaps dangerous” (Ennis 1996: 172).

Dewey thought that education for reflective thinking would be of value to both the individual and society; recognition in educational practice of the kinship to the scientific attitude of children’s native curiosity, fertile imagination and love of experimental inquiry “would make for individual happiness and the reduction of social waste” (Dewey 1910: iii). Schools participating in the Eight-Year Study took development of the habit of reflective thinking and skill in solving problems as a means to leading young people to understand, appreciate and live the democratic way of life characteristic of the United States (Aikin 1942: 17–18, 81). Harvey Siegel (1988: 55–61) has offered four considerations in support of adopting critical thinking as an educational ideal. (1) Respect for persons requires that schools and teachers honour students’ demands for reasons and explanations, deal with students honestly, and recognize the need to confront students’ independent judgment; these requirements concern the manner in which teachers treat students. (2) Education has the task of preparing children to be successful adults, a task that requires development of their self-sufficiency. (3) Education should initiate children into the rational traditions in such fields as history, science and mathematics. (4) Education should prepare children to become democratic citizens, which requires reasoned procedures and critical talents and attitudes. To supplement these considerations, Siegel (1988: 62–90) responds to two objections: the ideology objection that adoption of any educational ideal requires a prior ideological commitment and the indoctrination objection that cultivation of critical thinking cannot escape being a form of indoctrination.

Despite the diversity of our 11 examples, one can recognize a common pattern. Dewey analyzed it as consisting of five phases:

• suggestions , in which the mind leaps forward to a possible solution;
• an intellectualization of the difficulty or perplexity into a problem to be solved, a question for which the answer must be sought;
• the use of one suggestion after another as a leading idea, or hypothesis , to initiate and guide observation and other operations in collection of factual material;
• the mental elaboration of the idea or supposition as an idea or supposition ( reasoning , in the sense on which reasoning is a part, not the whole, of inference); and
• testing the hypothesis by overt or imaginative action. (Dewey 1933: 106–107; italics in original)

The process of reflective thinking consisting of these phases would be preceded by a perplexed, troubled or confused situation and followed by a cleared-up, unified, resolved situation (Dewey 1933: 106). The term ‘phases’ replaced the term ‘steps’ (Dewey 1910: 72), thus removing the earlier suggestion of an invariant sequence. Variants of the above analysis appeared in (Dewey 1916: 177) and (Dewey 1938: 101–119).

The variant formulations indicate the difficulty of giving a single logical analysis of such a varied process. The process of critical thinking may have a spiral pattern, with the problem being redefined in the light of obstacles to solving it as originally formulated. For example, the person in Transit might have concluded that getting to the appointment at the scheduled time was impossible and have reformulated the problem as that of rescheduling the appointment for a mutually convenient time. Further, defining a problem does not always follow after or lead immediately to an idea of a suggested solution. Nor should it do so, as Dewey himself recognized in describing the physician in Typhoid as avoiding any strong preference for this or that conclusion before getting further information (Dewey 1910: 85; 1933: 170). People with a hypothesis in mind, even one to which they have a very weak commitment, have a so-called “confirmation bias” (Nickerson 1998): they are likely to pay attention to evidence that confirms the hypothesis and to ignore evidence that counts against it or for some competing hypothesis. Detectives, intelligence agencies, and investigators of airplane accidents are well advised to gather relevant evidence systematically and to postpone even tentative adoption of an explanatory hypothesis until the collected evidence rules out with the appropriate degree of certainty all but one explanation. Dewey’s analysis of the critical thinking process can be faulted as well for requiring acceptance or rejection of a possible solution to a defined problem, with no allowance for deciding in the light of the available evidence to suspend judgment. Further, given the great variety of kinds of problems for which reflection is appropriate, there is likely to be variation in its component events. Perhaps the best way to conceptualize the critical thinking process is as a checklist whose component events can occur in a variety of orders, selectively, and more than once. These component events might include (1) noticing a difficulty, (2) defining the problem, (3) dividing the problem into manageable sub-problems, (4) formulating a variety of possible solutions to the problem or sub-problem, (5) determining what evidence is relevant to deciding among possible solutions to the problem or sub-problem, (6) devising a plan of systematic observation or experiment that will uncover the relevant evidence, (7) carrying out the plan of systematic observation or experimentation, (8) noting the results of the systematic observation or experiment, (9) gathering relevant testimony and information from others, (10) judging the credibility of testimony and information gathered from others, (11) drawing conclusions from gathered evidence and accepted testimony, and (12) accepting a solution that the evidence adequately supports (cf. Hitchcock 2017: 485).

Checklist conceptions of the process of critical thinking are open to the objection that they are too mechanical and procedural to fit the multi-dimensional and emotionally charged issues for which critical thinking is urgently needed (Paul 1984). For such issues, a more dialectical process is advocated, in which competing relevant world views are identified, their implications explored, and some sort of creative synthesis attempted.

If one considers the critical thinking process illustrated by the 11 examples, one can identify distinct kinds of mental acts and mental states that form part of it. To distinguish, label and briefly characterize these components is a useful preliminary to identifying abilities, skills, dispositions, attitudes, habits and the like that contribute causally to thinking critically. Identifying such abilities and habits is in turn a useful preliminary to setting educational goals. Setting the goals is in its turn a useful preliminary to designing strategies for helping learners to achieve the goals and to designing ways of measuring the extent to which learners have done so. Such measures provide both feedback to learners on their achievement and a basis for experimental research on the effectiveness of various strategies for educating people to think critically. Let us begin, then, by distinguishing the kinds of mental acts and mental events that can occur in a critical thinking process.

• Observing : One notices something in one’s immediate environment (sudden cooling of temperature in Weather , bubbles forming outside a glass and then going inside in Bubbles , a moving blur in the distance in Blur , a rash in Rash ). Or one notes the results of an experiment or systematic observation (valuables missing in Disorder , no suction without air pressure in Suction pump )
• Feeling : One feels puzzled or uncertain about something (how to get to an appointment on time in Transit , why the diamonds vary in spacing in Diamond ). One wants to resolve this perplexity. One feels satisfaction once one has worked out an answer (to take the subway express in Transit , diamonds closer when needed as a warning in Diamond ).
• Wondering : One formulates a question to be addressed (why bubbles form outside a tumbler taken from hot water in Bubbles , how suction pumps work in Suction pump , what caused the rash in Rash ).
• Imagining : One thinks of possible answers (bus or subway or elevated in Transit , flagpole or ornament or wireless communication aid or direction indicator in Ferryboat , allergic reaction or heat rash in Rash ).
• Inferring : One works out what would be the case if a possible answer were assumed (valuables missing if there has been a burglary in Disorder , earlier start to the rash if it is an allergic reaction to a sulfa drug in Rash ). Or one draws a conclusion once sufficient relevant evidence is gathered (take the subway in Transit , burglary in Disorder , discontinue blood pressure medication and new cream in Rash ).
• Knowledge : One uses stored knowledge of the subject-matter to generate possible answers or to infer what would be expected on the assumption of a particular answer (knowledge of a city’s public transit system in Transit , of the requirements for a flagpole in Ferryboat , of Boyle’s law in Bubbles , of allergic reactions in Rash ).
• Experimenting : One designs and carries out an experiment or a systematic observation to find out whether the results deduced from a possible answer will occur (looking at the location of the flagpole in relation to the pilot’s position in Ferryboat , putting an ice cube on top of a tumbler taken from hot water in Bubbles , measuring the height to which a suction pump will draw water at different elevations in Suction pump , noticing the spacing of diamonds when movement to or from a diamond lane is allowed in Diamond ).
• Consulting : One finds a source of information, gets the information from the source, and makes a judgment on whether to accept it. None of our 11 examples include searching for sources of information. In this respect they are unrepresentative, since most people nowadays have almost instant access to information relevant to answering any question, including many of those illustrated by the examples. However, Candidate includes the activities of extracting information from sources and evaluating its credibility.
• Identifying and analyzing arguments : One notices an argument and works out its structure and content as a preliminary to evaluating its strength. This activity is central to Candidate . It is an important part of a critical thinking process in which one surveys arguments for various positions on an issue.
• Judging : One makes a judgment on the basis of accumulated evidence and reasoning, such as the judgment in Ferryboat that the purpose of the pole is to provide direction to the pilot.
• Deciding : One makes a decision on what to do or on what policy to adopt, as in the decision in Transit to take the subway.

By definition, a person who does something voluntarily is both willing and able to do that thing at that time. Both the willingness and the ability contribute causally to the person’s action, in the sense that the voluntary action would not occur if either (or both) of these were lacking. For example, suppose that one is standing with one’s arms at one’s sides and one voluntarily lifts one’s right arm to an extended horizontal position. One would not do so if one were unable to lift one’s arm, if for example one’s right side was paralyzed as the result of a stroke. Nor would one do so if one were unwilling to lift one’s arm, if for example one were participating in a street demonstration at which a white supremacist was urging the crowd to lift their right arm in a Nazi salute and one were unwilling to express support in this way for the racist Nazi ideology. The same analysis applies to a voluntary mental process of thinking critically. It requires both willingness and ability to think critically, including willingness and ability to perform each of the mental acts that compose the process and to coordinate those acts in a sequence that is directed at resolving the initiating perplexity.

Consider willingness first. We can identify causal contributors to willingness to think critically by considering factors that would cause a person who was able to think critically about an issue nevertheless not to do so (Hamby 2014). For each factor, the opposite condition thus contributes causally to willingness to think critically on a particular occasion. For example, people who habitually jump to conclusions without considering alternatives will not think critically about issues that arise, even if they have the required abilities. The contrary condition of willingness to suspend judgment is thus a causal contributor to thinking critically.

Now consider ability. In contrast to the ability to move one’s arm, which can be completely absent because a stroke has left the arm paralyzed, the ability to think critically is a developed ability, whose absence is not a complete absence of ability to think but absence of ability to think well. We can identify the ability to think well directly, in terms of the norms and standards for good thinking. In general, to be able do well the thinking activities that can be components of a critical thinking process, one needs to know the concepts and principles that characterize their good performance, to recognize in particular cases that the concepts and principles apply, and to apply them. The knowledge, recognition and application may be procedural rather than declarative. It may be domain-specific rather than widely applicable, and in either case may need subject-matter knowledge, sometimes of a deep kind.

Reflections of the sort illustrated by the previous two paragraphs have led scholars to identify the knowledge, abilities and dispositions of a “critical thinker”, i.e., someone who thinks critically whenever it is appropriate to do so. We turn now to these three types of causal contributors to thinking critically. We start with dispositions, since arguably these are the most powerful contributors to being a critical thinker, can be fostered at an early stage of a child’s development, and are susceptible to general improvement (Glaser 1941: 175)

8. Critical Thinking Dispositions

Educational researchers use the term ‘dispositions’ broadly for the habits of mind and attitudes that contribute causally to being a critical thinker. Some writers (e.g., Paul & Elder 2006; Hamby 2014; Bailin & Battersby 2016a) propose to use the term ‘virtues’ for this dimension of a critical thinker. The virtues in question, although they are virtues of character, concern the person’s ways of thinking rather than the person’s ways of behaving towards others. They are not moral virtues but intellectual virtues, of the sort articulated by Zagzebski (1996) and discussed by Turri, Alfano, and Greco (2017).

On a realistic conception, thinking dispositions or intellectual virtues are real properties of thinkers. They are general tendencies, propensities, or inclinations to think in particular ways in particular circumstances, and can be genuinely explanatory (Siegel 1999). Sceptics argue that there is no evidence for a specific mental basis for the habits of mind that contribute to thinking critically, and that it is pedagogically misleading to posit such a basis (Bailin et al. 1999a). Whatever their status, critical thinking dispositions need motivation for their initial formation in a child—motivation that may be external or internal. As children develop, the force of habit will gradually become important in sustaining the disposition (Nieto & Valenzuela 2012). Mere force of habit, however, is unlikely to sustain critical thinking dispositions. Critical thinkers must value and enjoy using their knowledge and abilities to think things through for themselves. They must be committed to, and lovers of, inquiry.

A person may have a critical thinking disposition with respect to only some kinds of issues. For example, one could be open-minded about scientific issues but not about religious issues. Similarly, one could be confident in one’s ability to reason about the theological implications of the existence of evil in the world but not in one’s ability to reason about the best design for a guided ballistic missile.

Facione (1990a: 25) divides “affective dispositions” of critical thinking into approaches to life and living in general and approaches to specific issues, questions or problems. Adapting this distinction, one can usefully divide critical thinking dispositions into initiating dispositions (those that contribute causally to starting to think critically about an issue) and internal dispositions (those that contribute causally to doing a good job of thinking critically once one has started). The two categories are not mutually exclusive. For example, open-mindedness, in the sense of willingness to consider alternative points of view to one’s own, is both an initiating and an internal disposition.

Using the strategy of considering factors that would block people with the ability to think critically from doing so, we can identify as initiating dispositions for thinking critically attentiveness, a habit of inquiry, self-confidence, courage, open-mindedness, willingness to suspend judgment, trust in reason, wanting evidence for one’s beliefs, and seeking the truth. We consider briefly what each of these dispositions amounts to, in each case citing sources that acknowledge them.

• Attentiveness : One will not think critically if one fails to recognize an issue that needs to be thought through. For example, the pedestrian in Weather would not have looked up if he had not noticed that the air was suddenly cooler. To be a critical thinker, then, one needs to be habitually attentive to one’s surroundings, noticing not only what one senses but also sources of perplexity in messages received and in one’s own beliefs and attitudes (Facione 1990a: 25; Facione, Facione, & Giancarlo 2001).
• Habit of inquiry : Inquiry is effortful, and one needs an internal push to engage in it. For example, the student in Bubbles could easily have stopped at idle wondering about the cause of the bubbles rather than reasoning to a hypothesis, then designing and executing an experiment to test it. Thus willingness to think critically needs mental energy and initiative. What can supply that energy? Love of inquiry, or perhaps just a habit of inquiry. Hamby (2015) has argued that willingness to inquire is the central critical thinking virtue, one that encompasses all the others. It is recognized as a critical thinking disposition by Dewey (1910: 29; 1933: 35), Glaser (1941: 5), Ennis (1987: 12; 1991: 8), Facione (1990a: 25), Bailin et al. (1999b: 294), Halpern (1998: 452), and Facione, Facione, & Giancarlo (2001).
• Self-confidence : Lack of confidence in one’s abilities can block critical thinking. For example, if the woman in Rash lacked confidence in her ability to figure things out for herself, she might just have assumed that the rash on her chest was the allergic reaction to her medication against which the pharmacist had warned her. Thus willingness to think critically requires confidence in one’s ability to inquire (Facione 1990a: 25; Facione, Facione, & Giancarlo 2001).
• Courage : Fear of thinking for oneself can stop one from doing it. Thus willingness to think critically requires intellectual courage (Paul & Elder 2006: 16).
• Open-mindedness : A dogmatic attitude will impede thinking critically. For example, a person who adheres rigidly to a “pro-choice” position on the issue of the legal status of induced abortion is likely to be unwilling to consider seriously the issue of when in its development an unborn child acquires a moral right to life. Thus willingness to think critically requires open-mindedness, in the sense of a willingness to examine questions to which one already accepts an answer but which further evidence or reasoning might cause one to answer differently (Dewey 1933; Facione 1990a; Ennis 1991; Bailin et al. 1999b; Halpern 1998, Facione, Facione, & Giancarlo 2001). Paul (1981) emphasizes open-mindedness about alternative world-views, and recommends a dialectical approach to integrating such views as central to what he calls “strong sense” critical thinking. In three studies, Haran, Ritov, & Mellers (2013) found that actively open-minded thinking, including “the tendency to weigh new evidence against a favored belief, to spend sufficient time on a problem before giving up, and to consider carefully the opinions of others in forming one’s own”, led study participants to acquire information and thus to make accurate estimations.
• Willingness to suspend judgment : Premature closure on an initial solution will block critical thinking. Thus willingness to think critically requires a willingness to suspend judgment while alternatives are explored (Facione 1990a; Ennis 1991; Halpern 1998).
• Trust in reason : Since distrust in the processes of reasoned inquiry will dissuade one from engaging in it, trust in them is an initiating critical thinking disposition (Facione 1990a, 25; Bailin et al. 1999b: 294; Facione, Facione, & Giancarlo 2001; Paul & Elder 2006). In reaction to an allegedly exclusive emphasis on reason in critical thinking theory and pedagogy, Thayer-Bacon (2000) argues that intuition, imagination, and emotion have important roles to play in an adequate conception of critical thinking that she calls “constructive thinking”. From her point of view, critical thinking requires trust not only in reason but also in intuition, imagination, and emotion.
• Seeking the truth : If one does not care about the truth but is content to stick with one’s initial bias on an issue, then one will not think critically about it. Seeking the truth is thus an initiating critical thinking disposition (Bailin et al. 1999b: 294; Facione, Facione, & Giancarlo 2001). A disposition to seek the truth is implicit in more specific critical thinking dispositions, such as trying to be well-informed, considering seriously points of view other than one’s own, looking for alternatives, suspending judgment when the evidence is insufficient, and adopting a position when the evidence supporting it is sufficient.

Some of the initiating dispositions, such as open-mindedness and willingness to suspend judgment, are also internal critical thinking dispositions, in the sense of mental habits or attitudes that contribute causally to doing a good job of critical thinking once one starts the process. But there are many other internal critical thinking dispositions. Some of them are parasitic on one’s conception of good thinking. For example, it is constitutive of good thinking about an issue to formulate the issue clearly and to maintain focus on it. For this purpose, one needs not only the corresponding ability but also the corresponding disposition. Ennis (1991: 8) describes it as the disposition “to determine and maintain focus on the conclusion or question”, Facione (1990a: 25) as “clarity in stating the question or concern”. Other internal dispositions are motivators to continue or adjust the critical thinking process, such as willingness to persist in a complex task and willingness to abandon nonproductive strategies in an attempt to self-correct (Halpern 1998: 452). For a list of identified internal critical thinking dispositions, see the Supplement on Internal Critical Thinking Dispositions .

Some theorists postulate skills, i.e., acquired abilities, as operative in critical thinking. It is not obvious, however, that a good mental act is the exercise of a generic acquired skill. Inferring an expected time of arrival, as in Transit , has some generic components but also uses non-generic subject-matter knowledge. Bailin et al. (1999a) argue against viewing critical thinking skills as generic and discrete, on the ground that skilled performance at a critical thinking task cannot be separated from knowledge of concepts and from domain-specific principles of good thinking. Talk of skills, they concede, is unproblematic if it means merely that a person with critical thinking skills is capable of intelligent performance.

Despite such scepticism, theorists of critical thinking have listed as general contributors to critical thinking what they variously call abilities (Glaser 1941; Ennis 1962, 1991), skills (Facione 1990a; Halpern 1998) or competencies (Fisher & Scriven 1997). Amalgamating these lists would produce a confusing and chaotic cornucopia of more than 50 possible educational objectives, with only partial overlap among them. It makes sense instead to try to understand the reasons for the multiplicity and diversity, and to make a selection according to one’s own reasons for singling out abilities to be developed in a critical thinking curriculum. Two reasons for diversity among lists of critical thinking abilities are the underlying conception of critical thinking and the envisaged educational level. Appraisal-only conceptions, for example, involve a different suite of abilities than constructive-only conceptions. Some lists, such as those in (Glaser 1941), are put forward as educational objectives for secondary school students, whereas others are proposed as objectives for college students (e.g., Facione 1990a).

The abilities described in the remaining paragraphs of this section emerge from reflection on the general abilities needed to do well the thinking activities identified in section 6 as components of the critical thinking process described in section 5 . The derivation of each collection of abilities is accompanied by citation of sources that list such abilities and of standardized tests that claim to test them.

Observational abilities : Careful and accurate observation sometimes requires specialist expertise and practice, as in the case of observing birds and observing accident scenes. However, there are general abilities of noticing what one’s senses are picking up from one’s environment and of being able to articulate clearly and accurately to oneself and others what one has observed. It helps in exercising them to be able to recognize and take into account factors that make one’s observation less trustworthy, such as prior framing of the situation, inadequate time, deficient senses, poor observation conditions, and the like. It helps as well to be skilled at taking steps to make one’s observation more trustworthy, such as moving closer to get a better look, measuring something three times and taking the average, and checking what one thinks one is observing with someone else who is in a good position to observe it. It also helps to be skilled at recognizing respects in which one’s report of one’s observation involves inference rather than direct observation, so that one can then consider whether the inference is justified. These abilities come into play as well when one thinks about whether and with what degree of confidence to accept an observation report, for example in the study of history or in a criminal investigation or in assessing news reports. Observational abilities show up in some lists of critical thinking abilities (Ennis 1962: 90; Facione 1990a: 16; Ennis 1991: 9). There are items testing a person’s ability to judge the credibility of observation reports in the Cornell Critical Thinking Tests, Levels X and Z (Ennis & Millman 1971; Ennis, Millman, & Tomko 1985, 2005). Norris and King (1983, 1985, 1990a, 1990b) is a test of ability to appraise observation reports.

Emotional abilities : The emotions that drive a critical thinking process are perplexity or puzzlement, a wish to resolve it, and satisfaction at achieving the desired resolution. Children experience these emotions at an early age, without being trained to do so. Education that takes critical thinking as a goal needs only to channel these emotions and to make sure not to stifle them. Collaborative critical thinking benefits from ability to recognize one’s own and others’ emotional commitments and reactions.

Questioning abilities : A critical thinking process needs transformation of an inchoate sense of perplexity into a clear question. Formulating a question well requires not building in questionable assumptions, not prejudging the issue, and using language that in context is unambiguous and precise enough (Ennis 1962: 97; 1991: 9).

Imaginative abilities : Thinking directed at finding the correct causal explanation of a general phenomenon or particular event requires an ability to imagine possible explanations. Thinking about what policy or plan of action to adopt requires generation of options and consideration of possible consequences of each option. Domain knowledge is required for such creative activity, but a general ability to imagine alternatives is helpful and can be nurtured so as to become easier, quicker, more extensive, and deeper (Dewey 1910: 34–39; 1933: 40–47). Facione (1990a) and Halpern (1998) include the ability to imagine alternatives as a critical thinking ability.

Inferential abilities : The ability to draw conclusions from given information, and to recognize with what degree of certainty one’s own or others’ conclusions follow, is universally recognized as a general critical thinking ability. All 11 examples in section 2 of this article include inferences, some from hypotheses or options (as in Transit , Ferryboat and Disorder ), others from something observed (as in Weather and Rash ). None of these inferences is formally valid. Rather, they are licensed by general, sometimes qualified substantive rules of inference (Toulmin 1958) that rest on domain knowledge—that a bus trip takes about the same time in each direction, that the terminal of a wireless telegraph would be located on the highest possible place, that sudden cooling is often followed by rain, that an allergic reaction to a sulfa drug generally shows up soon after one starts taking it. It is a matter of controversy to what extent the specialized ability to deduce conclusions from premisses using formal rules of inference is needed for critical thinking. Dewey (1933) locates logical forms in setting out the products of reflection rather than in the process of reflection. Ennis (1981a), on the other hand, maintains that a liberally-educated person should have the following abilities: to translate natural-language statements into statements using the standard logical operators, to use appropriately the language of necessary and sufficient conditions, to deal with argument forms and arguments containing symbols, to determine whether in virtue of an argument’s form its conclusion follows necessarily from its premisses, to reason with logically complex propositions, and to apply the rules and procedures of deductive logic. Inferential abilities are recognized as critical thinking abilities by Glaser (1941: 6), Facione (1990a: 9), Ennis (1991: 9), Fisher & Scriven (1997: 99, 111), and Halpern (1998: 452). Items testing inferential abilities constitute two of the five subtests of the Watson Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal (Watson & Glaser 1980a, 1980b, 1994), two of the four sections in the Cornell Critical Thinking Test Level X (Ennis & Millman 1971; Ennis, Millman, & Tomko 1985, 2005), three of the seven sections in the Cornell Critical Thinking Test Level Z (Ennis & Millman 1971; Ennis, Millman, & Tomko 1985, 2005), 11 of the 34 items on Forms A and B of the California Critical Thinking Skills Test (Facione 1990b, 1992), and a high but variable proportion of the 25 selected-response questions in the Collegiate Learning Assessment (Council for Aid to Education 2017).

Experimenting abilities : Knowing how to design and execute an experiment is important not just in scientific research but also in everyday life, as in Rash . Dewey devoted a whole chapter of his How We Think (1910: 145–156; 1933: 190–202) to the superiority of experimentation over observation in advancing knowledge. Experimenting abilities come into play at one remove in appraising reports of scientific studies. Skill in designing and executing experiments includes the acknowledged abilities to appraise evidence (Glaser 1941: 6), to carry out experiments and to apply appropriate statistical inference techniques (Facione 1990a: 9), to judge inductions to an explanatory hypothesis (Ennis 1991: 9), and to recognize the need for an adequately large sample size (Halpern 1998). The Cornell Critical Thinking Test Level Z (Ennis & Millman 1971; Ennis, Millman, & Tomko 1985, 2005) includes four items (out of 52) on experimental design. The Collegiate Learning Assessment (Council for Aid to Education 2017) makes room for appraisal of study design in both its performance task and its selected-response questions.

Consulting abilities : Skill at consulting sources of information comes into play when one seeks information to help resolve a problem, as in Candidate . Ability to find and appraise information includes ability to gather and marshal pertinent information (Glaser 1941: 6), to judge whether a statement made by an alleged authority is acceptable (Ennis 1962: 84), to plan a search for desired information (Facione 1990a: 9), and to judge the credibility of a source (Ennis 1991: 9). Ability to judge the credibility of statements is tested by 24 items (out of 76) in the Cornell Critical Thinking Test Level X (Ennis & Millman 1971; Ennis, Millman, & Tomko 1985, 2005) and by four items (out of 52) in the Cornell Critical Thinking Test Level Z (Ennis & Millman 1971; Ennis, Millman, & Tomko 1985, 2005). The College Learning Assessment’s performance task requires evaluation of whether information in documents is credible or unreliable (Council for Aid to Education 2017).

Argument analysis abilities : The ability to identify and analyze arguments contributes to the process of surveying arguments on an issue in order to form one’s own reasoned judgment, as in Candidate . The ability to detect and analyze arguments is recognized as a critical thinking skill by Facione (1990a: 7–8), Ennis (1991: 9) and Halpern (1998). Five items (out of 34) on the California Critical Thinking Skills Test (Facione 1990b, 1992) test skill at argument analysis. The College Learning Assessment (Council for Aid to Education 2017) incorporates argument analysis in its selected-response tests of critical reading and evaluation and of critiquing an argument.

Judging skills and deciding skills : Skill at judging and deciding is skill at recognizing what judgment or decision the available evidence and argument supports, and with what degree of confidence. It is thus a component of the inferential skills already discussed.

Lists and tests of critical thinking abilities often include two more abilities: identifying assumptions and constructing and evaluating definitions.

In addition to dispositions and abilities, critical thinking needs knowledge: of critical thinking concepts, of critical thinking principles, and of the subject-matter of the thinking.

We can derive a short list of concepts whose understanding contributes to critical thinking from the critical thinking abilities described in the preceding section. Observational abilities require an understanding of the difference between observation and inference. Questioning abilities require an understanding of the concepts of ambiguity and vagueness. Inferential abilities require an understanding of the difference between conclusive and defeasible inference (traditionally, between deduction and induction), as well as of the difference between necessary and sufficient conditions. Experimenting abilities require an understanding of the concepts of hypothesis, null hypothesis, assumption and prediction, as well as of the concept of statistical significance and of its difference from importance. They also require an understanding of the difference between an experiment and an observational study, and in particular of the difference between a randomized controlled trial, a prospective correlational study and a retrospective (case-control) study. Argument analysis abilities require an understanding of the concepts of argument, premiss, assumption, conclusion and counter-consideration. Additional critical thinking concepts are proposed by Bailin et al. (1999b: 293), Fisher & Scriven (1997: 105–106), Black (2012), and Blair (2021).

According to Glaser (1941: 25), ability to think critically requires knowledge of the methods of logical inquiry and reasoning. If we review the list of abilities in the preceding section, however, we can see that some of them can be acquired and exercised merely through practice, possibly guided in an educational setting, followed by feedback. Searching intelligently for a causal explanation of some phenomenon or event requires that one consider a full range of possible causal contributors, but it seems more important that one implements this principle in one’s practice than that one is able to articulate it. What is important is “operational knowledge” of the standards and principles of good thinking (Bailin et al. 1999b: 291–293). But the development of such critical thinking abilities as designing an experiment or constructing an operational definition can benefit from learning their underlying theory. Further, explicit knowledge of quirks of human thinking seems useful as a cautionary guide. Human memory is not just fallible about details, as people learn from their own experiences of misremembering, but is so malleable that a detailed, clear and vivid recollection of an event can be a total fabrication (Loftus 2017). People seek or interpret evidence in ways that are partial to their existing beliefs and expectations, often unconscious of their “confirmation bias” (Nickerson 1998). Not only are people subject to this and other cognitive biases (Kahneman 2011), of which they are typically unaware, but it may be counter-productive for one to make oneself aware of them and try consciously to counteract them or to counteract social biases such as racial or sexual stereotypes (Kenyon & Beaulac 2014). It is helpful to be aware of these facts and of the superior effectiveness of blocking the operation of biases—for example, by making an immediate record of one’s observations, refraining from forming a preliminary explanatory hypothesis, blind refereeing, double-blind randomized trials, and blind grading of students’ work. It is also helpful to be aware of the prevalence of “noise” (unwanted unsystematic variability of judgments), of how to detect noise (through a noise audit), and of how to reduce noise: make accuracy the goal, think statistically, break a process of arriving at a judgment into independent tasks, resist premature intuitions, in a group get independent judgments first, favour comparative judgments and scales (Kahneman, Sibony, & Sunstein 2021). It is helpful as well to be aware of the concept of “bounded rationality” in decision-making and of the related distinction between “satisficing” and optimizing (Simon 1956; Gigerenzer 2001).

Critical thinking about an issue requires substantive knowledge of the domain to which the issue belongs. Critical thinking abilities are not a magic elixir that can be applied to any issue whatever by somebody who has no knowledge of the facts relevant to exploring that issue. For example, the student in Bubbles needed to know that gases do not penetrate solid objects like a glass, that air expands when heated, that the volume of an enclosed gas varies directly with its temperature and inversely with its pressure, and that hot objects will spontaneously cool down to the ambient temperature of their surroundings unless kept hot by insulation or a source of heat. Critical thinkers thus need a rich fund of subject-matter knowledge relevant to the variety of situations they encounter. This fact is recognized in the inclusion among critical thinking dispositions of a concern to become and remain generally well informed.

Experimental educational interventions, with control groups, have shown that education can improve critical thinking skills and dispositions, as measured by standardized tests. For information about these tests, see the Supplement on Assessment .

What educational methods are most effective at developing the dispositions, abilities and knowledge of a critical thinker? In a comprehensive meta-analysis of experimental and quasi-experimental studies of strategies for teaching students to think critically, Abrami et al. (2015) found that dialogue, anchored instruction, and mentoring each increased the effectiveness of the educational intervention, and that they were most effective when combined. They also found that in these studies a combination of separate instruction in critical thinking with subject-matter instruction in which students are encouraged to think critically was more effective than either by itself. However, the difference was not statistically significant; that is, it might have arisen by chance.

Most of these studies lack the longitudinal follow-up required to determine whether the observed differential improvements in critical thinking abilities or dispositions continue over time, for example until high school or college graduation. For details on studies of methods of developing critical thinking skills and dispositions, see the Supplement on Educational Methods .

12. Controversies

Scholars have denied the generalizability of critical thinking abilities across subject domains, have alleged bias in critical thinking theory and pedagogy, and have investigated the relationship of critical thinking to other kinds of thinking.

McPeck (1981) attacked the thinking skills movement of the 1970s, including the critical thinking movement. He argued that there are no general thinking skills, since thinking is always thinking about some subject-matter. It is futile, he claimed, for schools and colleges to teach thinking as if it were a separate subject. Rather, teachers should lead their pupils to become autonomous thinkers by teaching school subjects in a way that brings out their cognitive structure and that encourages and rewards discussion and argument. As some of his critics (e.g., Paul 1985; Siegel 1985) pointed out, McPeck’s central argument needs elaboration, since it has obvious counter-examples in writing and speaking, for which (up to a certain level of complexity) there are teachable general abilities even though they are always about some subject-matter. To make his argument convincing, McPeck needs to explain how thinking differs from writing and speaking in a way that does not permit useful abstraction of its components from the subject-matters with which it deals. He has not done so. Nevertheless, his position that the dispositions and abilities of a critical thinker are best developed in the context of subject-matter instruction is shared by many theorists of critical thinking, including Dewey (1910, 1933), Glaser (1941), Passmore (1980), Weinstein (1990), Bailin et al. (1999b), and Willingham (2019).

McPeck’s challenge prompted reflection on the extent to which critical thinking is subject-specific. McPeck argued for a strong subject-specificity thesis, according to which it is a conceptual truth that all critical thinking abilities are specific to a subject. (He did not however extend his subject-specificity thesis to critical thinking dispositions. In particular, he took the disposition to suspend judgment in situations of cognitive dissonance to be a general disposition.) Conceptual subject-specificity is subject to obvious counter-examples, such as the general ability to recognize confusion of necessary and sufficient conditions. A more modest thesis, also endorsed by McPeck, is epistemological subject-specificity, according to which the norms of good thinking vary from one field to another. Epistemological subject-specificity clearly holds to a certain extent; for example, the principles in accordance with which one solves a differential equation are quite different from the principles in accordance with which one determines whether a painting is a genuine Picasso. But the thesis suffers, as Ennis (1989) points out, from vagueness of the concept of a field or subject and from the obvious existence of inter-field principles, however broadly the concept of a field is construed. For example, the principles of hypothetico-deductive reasoning hold for all the varied fields in which such reasoning occurs. A third kind of subject-specificity is empirical subject-specificity, according to which as a matter of empirically observable fact a person with the abilities and dispositions of a critical thinker in one area of investigation will not necessarily have them in another area of investigation.

The thesis of empirical subject-specificity raises the general problem of transfer. If critical thinking abilities and dispositions have to be developed independently in each school subject, how are they of any use in dealing with the problems of everyday life and the political and social issues of contemporary society, most of which do not fit into the framework of a traditional school subject? Proponents of empirical subject-specificity tend to argue that transfer is more likely to occur if there is critical thinking instruction in a variety of domains, with explicit attention to dispositions and abilities that cut across domains. But evidence for this claim is scanty. There is a need for well-designed empirical studies that investigate the conditions that make transfer more likely.

It is common ground in debates about the generality or subject-specificity of critical thinking dispositions and abilities that critical thinking about any topic requires background knowledge about the topic. For example, the most sophisticated understanding of the principles of hypothetico-deductive reasoning is of no help unless accompanied by some knowledge of what might be plausible explanations of some phenomenon under investigation.

Critics have objected to bias in the theory, pedagogy and practice of critical thinking. Commentators (e.g., Alston 1995; Ennis 1998) have noted that anyone who takes a position has a bias in the neutral sense of being inclined in one direction rather than others. The critics, however, are objecting to bias in the pejorative sense of an unjustified favoring of certain ways of knowing over others, frequently alleging that the unjustly favoured ways are those of a dominant sex or culture (Bailin 1995). These ways favour:

• reinforcement of egocentric and sociocentric biases over dialectical engagement with opposing world-views (Paul 1981, 1984; Warren 1998)
• distancing from the object of inquiry over closeness to it (Martin 1992; Thayer-Bacon 1992)
• indifference to the situation of others over care for them (Martin 1992)
• orientation to thought over orientation to action (Martin 1992)
• being reasonable over caring to understand people’s ideas (Thayer-Bacon 1993)
• being neutral and objective over being embodied and situated (Thayer-Bacon 1995a)
• doubting over believing (Thayer-Bacon 1995b)
• reason over emotion, imagination and intuition (Thayer-Bacon 2000)
• solitary thinking over collaborative thinking (Thayer-Bacon 2000)
• written and spoken assignments over other forms of expression (Alston 2001)
• attention to written and spoken communications over attention to human problems (Alston 2001)
• winning debates in the public sphere over making and understanding meaning (Alston 2001)

A common thread in this smorgasbord of accusations is dissatisfaction with focusing on the logical analysis and evaluation of reasoning and arguments. While these authors acknowledge that such analysis and evaluation is part of critical thinking and should be part of its conceptualization and pedagogy, they insist that it is only a part. Paul (1981), for example, bemoans the tendency of atomistic teaching of methods of analyzing and evaluating arguments to turn students into more able sophists, adept at finding fault with positions and arguments with which they disagree but even more entrenched in the egocentric and sociocentric biases with which they began. Martin (1992) and Thayer-Bacon (1992) cite with approval the self-reported intimacy with their subject-matter of leading researchers in biology and medicine, an intimacy that conflicts with the distancing allegedly recommended in standard conceptions and pedagogy of critical thinking. Thayer-Bacon (2000) contrasts the embodied and socially embedded learning of her elementary school students in a Montessori school, who used their imagination, intuition and emotions as well as their reason, with conceptions of critical thinking as

thinking that is used to critique arguments, offer justifications, and make judgments about what are the good reasons, or the right answers. (Thayer-Bacon 2000: 127–128)

Alston (2001) reports that her students in a women’s studies class were able to see the flaws in the Cinderella myth that pervades much romantic fiction but in their own romantic relationships still acted as if all failures were the woman’s fault and still accepted the notions of love at first sight and living happily ever after. Students, she writes, should

be able to connect their intellectual critique to a more affective, somatic, and ethical account of making risky choices that have sexist, racist, classist, familial, sexual, or other consequences for themselves and those both near and far… critical thinking that reads arguments, texts, or practices merely on the surface without connections to feeling/desiring/doing or action lacks an ethical depth that should infuse the difference between mere cognitive activity and something we want to call critical thinking. (Alston 2001: 34)

Some critics portray such biases as unfair to women. Thayer-Bacon (1992), for example, has charged modern critical thinking theory with being sexist, on the ground that it separates the self from the object and causes one to lose touch with one’s inner voice, and thus stigmatizes women, who (she asserts) link self to object and listen to their inner voice. Her charge does not imply that women as a group are on average less able than men to analyze and evaluate arguments. Facione (1990c) found no difference by sex in performance on his California Critical Thinking Skills Test. Kuhn (1991: 280–281) found no difference by sex in either the disposition or the competence to engage in argumentative thinking.

The critics propose a variety of remedies for the biases that they allege. In general, they do not propose to eliminate or downplay critical thinking as an educational goal. Rather, they propose to conceptualize critical thinking differently and to change its pedagogy accordingly. Their pedagogical proposals arise logically from their objections. They can be summarized as follows:

• Focus on argument networks with dialectical exchanges reflecting contesting points of view rather than on atomic arguments, so as to develop “strong sense” critical thinking that transcends egocentric and sociocentric biases (Paul 1981, 1984).
• Foster closeness to the subject-matter and feeling connected to others in order to inform a humane democracy (Martin 1992).
• Develop “constructive thinking” as a social activity in a community of physically embodied and socially embedded inquirers with personal voices who value not only reason but also imagination, intuition and emotion (Thayer-Bacon 2000).
• In developing critical thinking in school subjects, treat as important neither skills nor dispositions but opening worlds of meaning (Alston 2001).
• Attend to the development of critical thinking dispositions as well as skills, and adopt the “critical pedagogy” practised and advocated by Freire (1968 [1970]) and hooks (1994) (Dalgleish, Girard, & Davies 2017).

A common thread in these proposals is treatment of critical thinking as a social, interactive, personally engaged activity like that of a quilting bee or a barn-raising (Thayer-Bacon 2000) rather than as an individual, solitary, distanced activity symbolized by Rodin’s The Thinker . One can get a vivid description of education with the former type of goal from the writings of bell hooks (1994, 2010). Critical thinking for her is open-minded dialectical exchange across opposing standpoints and from multiple perspectives, a conception similar to Paul’s “strong sense” critical thinking (Paul 1981). She abandons the structure of domination in the traditional classroom. In an introductory course on black women writers, for example, she assigns students to write an autobiographical paragraph about an early racial memory, then to read it aloud as the others listen, thus affirming the uniqueness and value of each voice and creating a communal awareness of the diversity of the group’s experiences (hooks 1994: 84). Her “engaged pedagogy” is thus similar to the “freedom under guidance” implemented in John Dewey’s Laboratory School of Chicago in the late 1890s and early 1900s. It incorporates the dialogue, anchored instruction, and mentoring that Abrami (2015) found to be most effective in improving critical thinking skills and dispositions.

What is the relationship of critical thinking to problem solving, decision-making, higher-order thinking, creative thinking, and other recognized types of thinking? One’s answer to this question obviously depends on how one defines the terms used in the question. If critical thinking is conceived broadly to cover any careful thinking about any topic for any purpose, then problem solving and decision making will be kinds of critical thinking, if they are done carefully. Historically, ‘critical thinking’ and ‘problem solving’ were two names for the same thing. If critical thinking is conceived more narrowly as consisting solely of appraisal of intellectual products, then it will be disjoint with problem solving and decision making, which are constructive.

Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives used the phrase “intellectual abilities and skills” for what had been labeled “critical thinking” by some, “reflective thinking” by Dewey and others, and “problem solving” by still others (Bloom et al. 1956: 38). Thus, the so-called “higher-order thinking skills” at the taxonomy’s top levels of analysis, synthesis and evaluation are just critical thinking skills, although they do not come with general criteria for their assessment (Ennis 1981b). The revised version of Bloom’s taxonomy (Anderson et al. 2001) likewise treats critical thinking as cutting across those types of cognitive process that involve more than remembering (Anderson et al. 2001: 269–270). For details, see the Supplement on History .

As to creative thinking, it overlaps with critical thinking (Bailin 1987, 1988). Thinking about the explanation of some phenomenon or event, as in Ferryboat , requires creative imagination in constructing plausible explanatory hypotheses. Likewise, thinking about a policy question, as in Candidate , requires creativity in coming up with options. Conversely, creativity in any field needs to be balanced by critical appraisal of the draft painting or novel or mathematical theory.

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• The Nature of Critical Thinking: An Outline of Critical Thinking Dispositions and Abilities , by Robert H. Ennis

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85 Fun Critical Thinking Questions for Kids & Teens

Have you ever thought about using fun questions to practice critical thinking?

Students may need a little guidance to think their way through questions that lack straightforward answers.

But it is that process that is important!

How the Right Questions Encourage Critical Thinking

Every parent knows how natural it is for children to ask questions. 

It should be encouraged. After all, asking questions helps with critical thinking.

As they grow older, however, training them to answer questions can be equally beneficial.

Posing questions that encourage kids to analyze, compare, and evaluate information can help them develop their ability to think critically about tough topics in the future. 

Of course, critical thinking questions for kids need to be age-appropriate—even better if you can mix a little fun into it!

That’s what I hope to help you with today. I’ve organized the questions below into three different ages groups:

• Upper elementary
• Middle school
• High school 

Get a Question-Based Critical Thinking Exercise—Free!

Introduce critical thinking gently & easily with thought-provoking exercises.

Upper Elementary

Students in upper elementary grades can be reluctant to put themselves out there, especially with answers that seem weird. 

In some cases, such hesitancy is actually fear of differing from their peers (and a barrier to critical thinking ). 

But that’s exactly why it’s important to practice answering ambiguous questions. 

We want our children to stand firm for their beliefs—not cave to peer pressure. 

Additionally, students may feel uneasy about answering serious questions, uncertain of tackling “big” problems. 

However, with careful use of creative questions for kids, it’s possible to engage even the most reluctant children in this age group. 

The idea is to simply get them interested in the conversation and questions asked.

If you have an especially reserved student, try starting with the funny critical thinking questions. 

Humor is a natural icebreaker that can make critical thinking questions more lighthearted and enjoyable. 

Of course, most younger kids just like to be silly, so playing upon that can keep them active and engaged.

With that said, here are some great questions to get you started:

1. Someone gives you a penguin. You can’t sell it or give it away. What do you do with it?

2. What would it be like if people could fly?

3. If animals could talk, what question would you ask? 

4. If you were ice cream, what kind would you be and why?

5. Do you want to travel back in time? If yes, how far back would you go? If no, why not?

6. What could you invent that would help your family? 

7. If you could stay up all night, what would you do?

8. What does the man on the moon do during the day?

9. What makes something weird or normal? 

10. Can you describe the tastes “salty” and “sweet” without using those words?

11. What does it feel like to ride a rollercoaster?

12. What makes a joke funny?

13. What two items would you take if you knew you would be stranded on an island and why?

14. Do you have a favorite way of laughing?

15. What noise makes you cringe and cover your ears? Why?

16. If you could be the parent for the day, what would you do?

17. If you could jump into your favorite movie and change the outcome, which one would you pick and why?

18. If you could be invisible for a day, what would you do?

19. What makes a day “perfect”?

20. If you owned a store, what kind of products would you sell?

21. If your parents were your age, would you be friends with them?

22. Would you still like your favorite food if it tasted the same as always, but now had an awful smell?

23. What would you do if you forgot to put your shoes on before leaving home?

24. Who would you be if you were a cartoon character?

25. How many hot dogs do you think you could eat in one sitting?

26. If you could breathe under water, what would you explore?

27. At what age do you think you stop being a kid?

28. If you had springs in your legs, what would you be able to do?

29. Can you describe the color blue to someone if they’re blind?

Middle School

At this point, students start to acquire more complex skills and are able to form their own conclusions based on the information they’re given. 

However, we can’t expect deep philosophical debates with 12 and 13 year olds. 

That said, as parent-teachers, we can certainly begin using more challenging questions to help them examine and rationalize their thought processes. 

Browse the fun critical thinking questions below for students in this age range. 

You might be surprised to see how receptive middle school kids can be to such thought-provoking (yet still fun) questions .

30. What would happen if it really did rain cats and dogs?

31. What does it mean to be lucky?

32. If you woke up in the middle of a dream, where would you be?

33. Is it ever okay to lie? Why or why not?

34. If you were solely responsible for creating laws, what one law would you make?

35. What makes a person a good friend?

36. What do you think is the most important skill you can take into adulthood?

37. If you had to give up lunch or dinner, which would you choose? Why?

38. How much money would you need to be considered rich?

39. If you knew you wouldn’t get caught, would you cheat on a test?

40. If you could live anywhere in the world, where would that be?

41. What is your greatest strength? How is that an asset?

42. If you had an opportunity to visit the International Space Station, would you do it?

43. Is it better to keep the peace or speak your mind?

44. Imagine yourself as your favorite animal. How would you spend your day?

45. Would you be friends with someone who didn’t have the same values as you?

46. How much screen time do you think is too much?

47. Can you describe your favorite color without naming it?

48. If you suddenly became blind, would you see things differently?

49. Would you ever go skydiving?

50. Describe the time you were the happiest in your life. Why did this make you happy?

51. If you had a million dollars, what would you do?

52. If you had to move to a new city, would you change how you present yourself to others?

53. What do you need to do in order to be famous?

54. If you could rewrite the ending of your favorite book or movie, what changes would you make?

55. How would you tackle a huge goal?

56. How would you sell ice to an eskimo in Alaska successfully?

57. What makes you unique?

High School

Critical thinking takes on an entirely different role once students reach high school. 

At this age, they have a greater sense of right and wrong (and what makes things so) as well as a better understanding of the world’s challenges.

Guiding teens to delve deeper and contemplate such things is an important part of developing their reasoning and critical thinking skills. 

Whether it’s fun questions about hypothetical superpowers or tough critical thinking questions about life, older teens typically have what it takes to think their way to a logical conclusion . 

Of course, use your discernment as you choose discussion topics, but here are some questions to help get you started:

58. How can you avoid [common problem] in the future?

59. Do you think it’s okay to take a life in order to save 5, 10, 20 or more people?

60. If you could go back and give your younger self advice, what would it be?

61. Is it better to give or receive a gift?

62. How important is it to be financially secure? Why?

63. If it was up to you, what one rule would you change in your family?

64. What would you do if a group of friends wanted to do something that you thought was a bad idea?

65. How do you know that something is a fact rather than an opinion?

66. What would it take to get you to change your mind?

67. What’s the most important thing in your life?

68. If money were of no concern, what job would you choose and why?

69. How do you know if you’re happy?

70. Do you think euthanasia is moral?

71. What is something you can do today that you weren’t able to do a year ago?

72. Is social media a good thing or not?

73. Is it right to keep animals in a zoo?

74. How does your attitude affect your abilities?

75. What would you do if you found out a friend was doing something dangerous?

76. If you could have any superpower, what would it be? Why?

77. What will life on Earth look like in 50 years?

78. Which is more important, ending world hunger or global warming?

79. Is it a good idea to lower the voting age to 16? Why or why not?

80. If the electrical power went out today, how would you cook if using wood wasn’t an option?

81. If you could magically transport yourself to any other place, where would that be and why?

82. When should teenagers be able to stay out all night?

83. Does the number zero actually exist?

84. What defines a generous person?

85. Does an influential person influence everyone?

Feel free to print out these fun critical thinking questions and incorporate them into your homeschool week!

will your children recognize truth?

About the author.

Jordan Mitchell

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What Are Critical Thinking Skills and Why Are They Important?

Learn what critical thinking skills are, why they’re important, and how to develop and apply them in your workplace and everyday life.

We often use critical thinking skills without even realizing it. When you make a decision, such as which cereal to eat for breakfast, you're using critical thinking to determine the best option for you that day.

Critical thinking is like a muscle that can be exercised and built over time. It is a skill that can help propel your career to new heights. You'll be able to solve workplace issues, use trial and error to troubleshoot ideas, and more.

We'll take you through what it is and some examples so you can begin your journey in mastering this skill.

What is critical thinking?

Critical thinking is the ability to interpret, evaluate, and analyze facts and information that are available, to form a judgment or decide if something is right or wrong.

More than just being curious about the world around you, critical thinkers make connections between logical ideas to see the bigger picture. Building your critical thinking skills means being able to advocate your ideas and opinions, present them in a logical fashion, and make decisions for improvement.

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Why is critical thinking important?

Critical thinking is useful in many areas of your life, including your career. It makes you a well-rounded individual, one who has looked at all of their options and possible solutions before making a choice.

According to the University of the People in California, having critical thinking skills is important because they are [ 1 ]:

Crucial for the economy

Essential for improving language and presentation skills

Very helpful in promoting creativity

Important for self-reflection

The basis of science and democracy 

Critical thinking skills are used every day in a myriad of ways and can be applied to situations such as a CEO approaching a group project or a nurse deciding in which order to treat their patients.

Examples of common critical thinking skills

Critical thinking skills differ from individual to individual and are utilized in various ways. Examples of common critical thinking skills include:

Identification of biases: Identifying biases means knowing there are certain people or things that may have an unfair prejudice or influence on the situation at hand. Pointing out these biases helps to remove them from contention when it comes to solving the problem and allows you to see things from a different perspective.

Research: Researching details and facts allows you to be prepared when presenting your information to people. You’ll know exactly what you’re talking about due to the time you’ve spent with the subject material, and you’ll be well-spoken and know what questions to ask to gain more knowledge. When researching, always use credible sources and factual information.

Open-mindedness: Being open-minded when having a conversation or participating in a group activity is crucial to success. Dismissing someone else’s ideas before you’ve heard them will inhibit you from progressing to a solution, and will often create animosity. If you truly want to solve a problem, you need to be willing to hear everyone’s opinions and ideas if you want them to hear yours.

Analysis: Analyzing your research will lead to you having a better understanding of the things you’ve heard and read. As a true critical thinker, you’ll want to seek out the truth and get to the source of issues. It’s important to avoid taking things at face value and always dig deeper.

Problem-solving: Problem-solving is perhaps the most important skill that critical thinkers can possess. The ability to solve issues and bounce back from conflict is what helps you succeed, be a leader, and effect change. One way to properly solve problems is to first recognize there’s a problem that needs solving. By determining the issue at hand, you can then analyze it and come up with several potential solutions.

How to develop critical thinking skills

You can develop critical thinking skills every day if you approach problems in a logical manner. Here are a few ways you can start your path to improvement:

1. Ask questions.

Be inquisitive about everything. Maintain a neutral perspective and develop a natural curiosity, so you can ask questions that develop your understanding of the situation or task at hand. The more details, facts, and information you have, the better informed you are to make decisions.

2. Practice active listening.

Utilize active listening techniques, which are founded in empathy, to really listen to what the other person is saying. Critical thinking, in part, is the cognitive process of reading the situation: the words coming out of their mouth, their body language, their reactions to your own words. Then, you might paraphrase to clarify what they're saying, so both of you agree you're on the same page.

3. Develop your logic and reasoning.

This is perhaps a more abstract task that requires practice and long-term development. However, think of a schoolteacher assessing the classroom to determine how to energize the lesson. There's options such as playing a game, watching a video, or challenging the students with a reward system. Using logic, you might decide that the reward system will take up too much time and is not an immediate fix. A video is not exactly relevant at this time. So, the teacher decides to play a simple word association game.

Scenarios like this happen every day, so next time, you can be more aware of what will work and what won't. Over time, developing your logic and reasoning will strengthen your critical thinking skills.

Learn tips and tricks on how to become a better critical thinker and problem solver through online courses from notable educational institutions on Coursera. Start with Introduction to Logic and Critical Thinking from Duke University or Mindware: Critical Thinking for the Information Age from the University of Michigan.

Article sources

University of the People, “ Why is Critical Thinking Important?: A Survival Guide , https://www.uopeople.edu/blog/why-is-critical-thinking-important/.” Accessed May 18, 2023.

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How to answer critical thinking questions

Whether you are studying and preparing to take the LSAT or looking to engage in more meaningful workplace discussions, you need to know how to properly answer critical thinking questions. Luckily, there are some key facets to critical thinking that can guide you along the way.

Thinking critically requires one to proceed beyond mere information recall. When asked to answer questions critically, one should engage their reasoning, evaluation, articulation, and questioning skills. You must closely examine the question in order to arrive at your justified answer. 

In this guide, we’ll be sharing some tips to help you answer critical thinking questions adequately. Read along as we discuss the ways to answer by asking useful questions, relying on logic, anticipating specific problems and solutions, and clearly communicating your thoughts. Let’s get into it!

Table of Contents

We’ll be discussing the following 6 methods of answering critical thinking questions in order to give you a framework to start with:

Ask the Important Questions

Consider all possible solutions, articulate yourself clearly, examine and reflect, research and inform yourself, organize your thoughts.

Sometimes, answering a question effectively requires you to ask some questions yourself. When it comes to thinking critically in your response, you may need to investigate by asking for context clues or clearing up any ambiguous aspects of the question.

When you follow-up a question with your own questions, you are engaging in truth-seeking behavior, which is a key element of critical thinking .

Examples of questions you can ask to arrive at a critical answer include:

• Why is this question or problem important?
• How would I solve this problem?
• What would be the consequences if I solved the problem X way?
• How would someone with a different opinion or set of values answer this question?
• Why do I agree or disagree?
• Can you provide me with an example?
• Who is this question geared towards?
• Who will be affected by the solution to this question/problem? 

Another thing that sets critical thinkers apart from traditional thinkers is the ability to anticipate multiple different outcomes.

Don’t merely stop at your first answer to the problem you’re being asked about. Take things a step further by drafting several different solutions. Follow step-by-step routes in your mind to try and anticipate how these solutions would play out in reality.

Would there be negative consequences to these solutions? Would there be positive consequences to these solutions? What are they? This can help you to narrow down your ideas and provide the best possible solution.

Critical thinking requires you to communicate your thoughts effectively, in addition to arriving at those thoughts in the first place.

Whether you are answering a critical thinking question verbally in a debate, or writing your thoughts down on a paper exam, you should learn how to justify your answer.

For each point or claim that you make, you should have a valid justification or explanation. Let’s say, for example, that you are asked a question about how to distribute a low amount of resources to a large community.

If you claim that they should be distributed evenly among households, you should consider how that route would affect larger households vs. smaller ones.

Your answer can explore the advantages and disadvantages of your method, landing on an explanation of how it would best serve the community.

When presented with a critical thinking question, it’s not enough to just read the question once and arrive at the first answer that pops into your mind. You should examine the question closely by reading it several times, carefully.

Each time you read the question, check to see if there are meanings or intentions in the question that you didn’t notice before. You can also take this time of reflection to discover ways in which your own assumptions or biases may be negatively influencing your answer.

You can take notes on these things and reflect on them before providing your answer to the question.

Only after examining and reflecting can you get to the precise heart of the question at hand. Then, you can pair it with an equally precise answer.

Critical thinkers also rely on research and newfound knowledge to inform their answers to questions. This involves taking the time to learn about topics that you’re questioned about if you are unfamiliar with them.

For example, if you are asked a question about the economy of a country that you are unfamiliar with, you should research before answering.

Read up on recent economic reports for that country, using credible sources. Make sure that you fully understand every word in the question by pulling out a dictionary.

From there, you can make your answer more accurate and logical overall.

Lastly, a good critical thinker should be able to organize the opinions and thoughts in their answers. Write out a draft of your answer before arriving at your final solution.

Read the answer back to yourself and see if your message is coming across clearly based on the grammar and syntax you’ve used.

If you need to break the answer down into parts and rearrange them to improve it, do so. An organized answer will be easier to understand and may make the difference between a good idea getting lost in the weeds or being championed.

Final Thoughts – 6 Critical Thinking Answer Tips

If you’ve been wanting to learn how to better answer critical thinking questions, then hopefully our guide has given you some inspiration. Some of the key aspects of critical thinking involve one’s ability to ask pertinent questions, examine and reflect on one’s thoughts, set aside biases, make judgments, and clearly communicate.

Make sure to refer to our critical thinking answer tips the next time you are faced with a tough question. Remember, sometimes, a critical answer relies on you taking extra time to research, re-read, re-write, and clarify your own thoughts.

https://louisville.edu/ideastoaction/about/criticalthinking/what

https://www.criticalthinking.org/pages/defining-critical-thinking/766

https://www.utc.edu/academic-affairs/walker-center-for-teaching-and-learning/faculty-programs/faculty-fellow-programs/faculty-fellow-program-development/basic-elements-of-critical-thinking

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Critical Thinking Questions

Describe the nature versus nurture controversy, and give an example of a trait and how it might be influenced by each?

Compare and contrast continuous and discontinuous development.

Why should developmental milestones only be used as a general guideline for normal child development?

What is the difference between assimilation and accommodation? Provide examples of each.

Why was Carol Gilligan critical of Kohlberg’s theory of moral development?

What is egocentrism? Provide an original example.

What are some known teratogens, and what kind of damage can they do to the developing fetus?

What is prenatal care and why is it important?

Describe what happens in the embryonic stage of development. Describe what happens in the fetal stage of development.

What makes a personal quality part of someone’s personality?

Describe some of the newborn reflexes. How might they promote survival?

Compare and contrast the four parenting styles and describe the kinds of childhood outcomes we can expect with each.

What is emerging adulthood and what are some factors that have contributed to this new stage of development?

Describe the five stages of grief and provide examples of how a person might react in each stage.

What is the purpose of hospice care?

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Critical thinking definition

Critical thinking, as described by Oxford Languages, is the objective analysis and evaluation of an issue in order to form a judgement.

Active and skillful approach, evaluation, assessment, synthesis, and/or evaluation of information obtained from, or made by, observation, knowledge, reflection, acumen or conversation, as a guide to belief and action, requires the critical thinking process, which is why it's often used in education and academics.

Some even may view it as a backbone of modern thought.

However, it's a skill, and skills must be trained and encouraged to be used at its full potential.

People turn up to various approaches in improving their critical thinking, like:

• Developing technical and problem-solving skills
• Engaging in more active listening
• Actively questioning their assumptions and beliefs
• Seeking out more diversity of thought
• Opening up their curiosity in an intellectual way etc.

Is critical thinking useful in writing?

Critical thinking can help in planning your paper and making it more concise, but it's not obvious at first. We carefully pinpointed some the questions you should ask yourself when boosting critical thinking in writing:

• What information should be included?
• Which information resources should the author look to?
• What degree of technical knowledge should the report assume its audience has?
• What is the most effective way to show information?
• How should the report be organized?
• How should it be designed?
• What tone and level of language difficulty should the document have?

Usage of critical thinking comes down not only to the outline of your paper, it also begs the question: How can we use critical thinking solving problems in our writing's topic?

Let's say, you have a Powerpoint on how critical thinking can reduce poverty in the United States. You'll primarily have to define critical thinking for the viewers, as well as use a lot of critical thinking questions and synonyms to get them to be familiar with your methods and start the thinking process behind it.

Are there any services that can help me use more critical thinking?

We understand that it's difficult to learn how to use critical thinking more effectively in just one article, but our service is here to help.

We are a team specializing in writing essays and other assignments for college students and all other types of customers who need a helping hand in its making. We cover a great range of topics, offer perfect quality work, always deliver on time and aim to leave our customers completely satisfied with what they ordered.

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More From Forbes

The business of thinking big – why managers should study philosophy.

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“Studying philosophy taught me two things. I learned how to write really clearly. I learned how to ... [+] follow an argument all the way down, which is invaluable in running meetings.” Stewart Butterfield, CEO and Co-founder of Slack

What is a leader? If David Attenborough and his camera crew were to go stalking through Manhattan or the Silicon Valley for their next nature documentary, how would they identify the CEOs? Perhaps by their plumage – the flash of diamond-studded cufflinks and sharp suits on Wall Street, or the tell-tale black turtleneck, jeans and sneakers of Palo Alto. But alas, it’s not so simple.

Leaders present themselves in myriad ways and are not nearly as uniform in their appearances as, say, an alpha silverback gorilla. This is because their leadership stems not from natural physical advantages, but from a willingness to embrace new ideas and learning opportunities. What determines a leader is at heart a philosophical – not a physiological – question.

This may explain why a number of chief executives majored in philosophy.

Meet the executives who majored in philosophy

Billionaire hedge fund manager George Soros is a great example. A philosophy major at the London School of Economics in the 1950s, Soros credits some of his financial success to understanding how concepts like reflexivity – being able to examine your own feelings, reactions and motivations, and how these influence what you do or thinik in a situation - apply to economics.

“I have developed a conceptual framework which has helped me both to make money as a hedge fund manager and to spend money as a policy-oriented philanthropist. But the framework itself is not about money, it is about the relationship between thinking and reality,” Soros wrote in the Financial Times .

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He stands in good company. Billionaire investor Carl Icahn, who many consider among the most ruthless individuals on Wall Street, graduated with an A.B. in philosophy from Princeton with a thesis on “The Problem of Formulating an Adequate Explication of the Empiricist Criterion of Meaning”.

Stewart Butterfield, CEO and Co-founder of Slack, has both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in philosophy, focusing on the philosophy of the mind. In his own words , “Studying philosophy taught me two things. I learned how to write really clearly. I learned how to follow an argument all the way down, which is invaluable in running meetings.”

Butterfield applied these skills in building a simple-to-use knowledge-management platform which is estimated to attract over 47 million daily users by 2025.

Similarly, Eva Chen channelled her background as a philosophy student at National Chengchi University in Taiwan into her role as CEO and Co-founder of Trend Micro, a global market leader in the field of cybersecurity software. Her lack of formal training as a software engineer allows her to bring a fresh perspective to the company.

“I am not that kind of CEO, who puts up a poker face and pretends to know everything. I keep asking why … Maybe it’s because I am a girl or I am not a hard-core electronic engineer; I am just never afraid of raising stupid questions,” she reflects .

According to chief development officer Oscar Chang, this might be one of her greatest strengths as a leader: “She has the gift of seeing beyond what engineers are blind to.”

Management is like a rollercoaster

It’s well attested that studying the humanities provides leaders with vital practical skills such as strong communication, critical thinking, and cultural awareness. But for Santiago Iñiguez, President of IE University in Spain, the connection between management and philosophy runs deeper still.

"True managers are humble and keep learning throughout their careers.” Santiago Iñiguez, President ... [+] of IE University

“I always believe that in management, which is a very pragmatic-oriented practice, there is philosophy in action behind every relevant management decision, behind any strategy to lead companies, behind the values and principles that guide the behaviour of managers,” he says.

“The important thing is that managers reflect and try to figure out what those principles and values are that guide their behaviour because this allows them to make much better decisions.”

Iñiguez draws on the teachings of philosophers throughout history, from Aristotle and Socrates in Ancient Greece to Ayn Rand and 17 th century Spanish cleric Baltasar Gracián, all of whom he believes still offer enrichment to today’s business leaders. Yet his voice is unmistakeably his own, combining the wisdom of generations past with a sense of relevancy lifted from the well of his own experiences.

“Renew your brilliance. Excellence grows old and so does fame,” said Gracián, to which Iñiguez expands, “Management is like a rollercoaster, so you cannot rest on your laurels – you have to perform well every day. You have to show that you are valid, committed, and can be the best.”

Indeed, the idea of ‘renewing your brilliance’ seems apt to IE University, an institution which was created through the expansion and diversification of IE Business School, but which now hosts four other schools, covering law, architecture and design, politics and global affairs, and science and technology. A new school focusing on humanities was announced last year.

“When I joined almost 33 years ago, the expansion and diversification at IE Business School was a fascinating experience. I was lucky enough to take part in the launch and creation of the first accreditation system for business schools in Europe, Equis, and then the creation of IE University 15 years ago,” Iñiguez explains.

“I learned the importance of working in a team. I’ve been lucky because I’ve worked on the shoulders of giants.”

The pursuit of happiness at work

In his latest book, Philosophy Inc.: Applying Wisdom to Everyday Management , Iñiguez credits Aristotle with getting it right when he said that “happiness is the meaning and purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.”

However, most people will spend much of their lives at work. The Independent reports that the average Briton will put in the equivalent of 3,507 days at work, including 204 days of overtime, during their lifetime. The typical employee will experience six office romances, 812 workplace arguments, and will brew 7,967 cups of tea or coffee for their colleagues.

So, is it still possible to pursue happiness on your way to the coffee machine? In Iñiguez’s view, it is.

“We should probably try to make our workplace the best possible place where we can actually engage with other people, where we can have fun, share times for humour and, of course, meet our colleagues and learn more about them because we are social animals,” he says.

“We need to know our colleagues in depth and that’s why, if we have to find happiness at work, it’s not just a question of achieving professional goals or getting a good compensation or being recognized by your colleagues; it’s also about having fun and enjoying the time you spend at work.”

"You have to be open to many different sources of learning. Unless you keep an open mind, you are ... [+] not going to achieve happiness and you are not going to achieve success in your profession." Santiago Iñiguez, President of IE Universit

Achieving this means people must act with integrity, which Iñiguez defines as a form of authenticity. It involves being consistent with your beliefs, paying respect to colleagues, knowing their concerns and how you can help them both professionally and personally.

“It’s not just fulfilling; it results in success and effective management. I believe that good managers are good professors because they teach their junior colleagues how to perform better,” he says.

Avoid the charisma trap

Socrates is often credited as the father of Western philosophy. Ironically, one of his best known maxims is, “I only know that I know nothing.”

It speaks to the value of humility, especially for those in leadership positions, and for the IE University President it is integral to being able to find joy in the workplace. When pride enters the scene, it is usually flanked by insecurity and blame, neither of which contributes to pleasant work environments.

Iñiguez warns against falling into the charisma trap of hiring based purely on a candidate’s force of personality.

“Normally, charismatic leaders are selfish. They are arrogant and don’t listen to others. They talk quickly. They are not the sort of reflective leaders that many corporations need,” he argues. “This is why I recommend that people do not make charisma the main characteristic when picking candidates.”

In Philosophy Inc., Santiago Iñiguez outlines several red flags that indicate a charismatic candidate is not right for the job, including the discrediting of others, a history of short stays in various positions, and flattery. He also offers several positive traits to look out for, such as willingness to offer sincere praise and external references from people who know the candidate well attest to their management skills.

Yet how should this be communicated in executive education, where participants have impressive résumés and a wealth of experience under their belts?

Training your brain

Iñiguez focuses on the potential for future growth. No matter how knowledgeable you are, there is always room to develop, to tweak, to reconsider.

“You have to be open to many different sources of learning. Unless you keep an open mind, you are not going to achieve happiness and you are not going to achieve success in your profession. True managers are humble and keep learning throughout their careers,” he says.

This open-mindedness is the crux of why philosophy is relevant to business leaders. There is a thought process behind every decision and every interaction with peers or employees. The question is, how well do you understand that thought process? How disciplined is your mind?

“As a human being, you have no choice about the fact that you need a philosophy,” said American writer Ayn Rand, addressing West Point graduates in 1974. “Your only choice is about whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberation – or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions.”

The brain is a muscle which must be exercised if it is to grapple with powerful ideas. For a business leader, this struggle is inescapable. As Iñiguez illustrates, “management is philosophy in action.” The more you understand how people think, the easier it becomes to digest arguments, and the swifter you are able to act in situations that require a decisive response.

So, what is a leader? They are the practical philosophers, the disciplined dreamers, because every business starts as a dream. What was Apple before Steve Jobs and his co-founders pooled their ideas in the mid-1970s? It was nothing more than the name of a fruit, that famously fell on Newton’s head.

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Student’s critical thinking skills in solving PISA-like mathematics questions on quantity content

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Marta Risa Putri Utami , Zulkardi , Ratu Ilma Indra Putri; Student’s critical thinking skills in solving PISA-like mathematics questions on quantity content. AIP Conf. Proc. 22 April 2024; 3052 (1): 020024. https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0201029

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This study aims to determine the student’s critical thinking skills in solving PISA-like questions in the context of Jakabaring Palembang tourism on quantity content. This type of research is descriptive, using four indicators of critical thinking skills: Interpretation, Analysis, Evaluation, and Inference. The subjects involved in this study were students in class VII, as many as 36 people. Data was collected through tests and observations and then analyzed qualitatively to measure students’ critical thinking skills. The results of this study indicate that the ability of critical thinking students is classified as medium with a total of 22 students, this can also be seen from completing PISA-like questions, and only 6 students are classified as low. In addition, the highest percentage of critical thinking indicators is on interpretation, 83.3%, while the lowest essential percentage of thinking indicators is on analysis, with a total of 13.8%. By solving PISA-like questions quantity content can train students to develop interpretation indicators on mathematical critical thinking skills as well as introduce Jakabaring Palembang tourism.

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Are You Asking the Right Questions?

A conversation with IMD Business School’s Arnaud Chevallier on simple changes to improve your decision-making.

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Few leaders have been trained to ask great questions. That might explain why they tend to be good at certain kinds of questions, and less effective at other kinds. Unfortunately, that hurts their ability to pursue strategic priorities. Arnaud Chevallier, strategy professor at IMD Business School, explains how leaders can break out of that rut and systematically ask five kinds of questions: investigative, speculative, productive, interpretive, and subjective. He shares real-life examples of how asking the right sort of question at a key time can unlock value and propel your organization. With his IMD colleagues Frédéric Dalsace and Jean-Louis Barsoux, Chevallier wrote the HBR article “ The Art of Asking Smarter Questions .”

CURT NICKISCH: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review, I’m Curt Nickisch.

The complexity and uncertainty around business today demands a different skill in leaders, namely the ability to ask illuminating questions.

Jensen Huang, the CEO of chip maker NVIDIA has said that over time, his job has become less about giving answers to problems, and more about asking questions; that he wants his team to join that exploration with him. And it’s probably not a coincidence that his company operates at the heart of the artificial intelligence revolution. After all, now that you have the ability to basically talk to a database, it really does come down to the questions you ask of it. By the way, we talked to him on IdeaCast on episode 940, check that out.

But today’s guest says few business professionals are trained in the skill of asking questions. They don’t know the different types of strategic questions, and even when they do hang question marks, they often have blind spots.

Here to explain is Arnaud Chevallier, a professor at IMD Business School, with his colleagues Frederic Dalsace and Jean-Louis Barsoux he wrote the HBR article, The Art of Asking Smarter Questions. Welcome, Arnaud.

ARNAUD CHEVALLIER: Thanks for having me, Curt.

CURT NICKISCH: Why is asking questions, this basic conversational skill, so hard for people?

ARNAUD CHEVALLIER: Well, I think we’ve all heard it, asking more questions helps people make better decisions. But there’s a dark side. Because whenever you’re asking one question, you’re not asking another type of question. And so if you’re under time pressure, you might be probing one side of a problem or decision but not other sides. And if you look at managers compared to other professions, lawyers, physicians, psychologists, they’re trained to ask better questions. Managers, seems like we are supposed to learn on the job.

CURT NICKISCH: And many do learn it and perhaps learn a certain kind of question that seems to work for them for some time. You point out a lot of people don’t understand that there are different types of questions that you can be asking, and they just by their nature tend to ask a certain type of question but avoid other ones just because it doesn’t come naturally to them.

ARNAUD CHEVALLIER: Yeah. That’s what we find speaking with managers and leaders across organizations. I think when you start professionally, you develop your own mix of questions. Maybe you pick up a couple questions that you think are insightful from your boss perhaps. You get to learn and hone that mix and it gets you here but it’s unclear when you get promoted to your next job that what got you here will get you there.

We are trained, we are told, “Ask open-ended questions, ask follow up questions.”

CURT NICKISCH: Yeah, ask why. Ask the five why’s.

ARNAUD CHEVALLIER: The five why’s, absolutely. But what else? You get to the, “Sure, good idea. I should ask why. What else should I ask?” And usually the guidance falls flat. We’ve been speaking with hundreds of executives, trying to understand which questions they ask. We’ve been speaking with very senior people trying to understand what works for them. And out of that we came together with a taxonomy of questions that we believe are useful in making better decisions, in solving complex problems.

CURT NICKISCH: This taxonomy basically divides strategic questions into five types, investigative, speculative, productive, interpretive and subjective. It’s probably smart for us to go through them one by one.

ARNAUD CHEVALLIER: Let’s, because that’s a mouthful, right? Let’s project ourselves into big decisions that you have to make maybe as a manager or maybe as just a person. Perhaps you’re thinking about buying a new house, maybe moving the family. Maybe you’re thinking about acquiring a new firm. Whenever we’re faced with those complex decisions, pretty quickly we want to identify, “Okay, what is it that we want to achieve?”

But we realize we don’t have enough information to achieve it. We need to get into investigative mode by asking ourselves, what’s known? What’s known about the problem? For instance, the five why’s. Or what’s known about the solutions, the potential solutions by asking how may we do this? How may we do that? The first type of question is investigative, helps you probe in depth into the problem or into the solution.

CURT NICKISCH: Some of the questions that can be asked here are what happened? What is and isn’t working? What are the causes of the problem? Those are all examples of investigative questions. Are these questions that are typically asked at the beginning of a process, or can they be used anywhere in problem solving?

ARNAUD CHEVALLIER: Yes. What we’re finding out is it works better actually if we go back and forth. There’s no real segmentation because investigative gets you to a point: you drill deeper into the problem or into the solutions, but going deep is not the only way. You may want to speculate as well. The second type of question is speculative questions, epitomized by what if? Speculative questions are here to help you foster innovation by challenging the implicit and the explicit assumptions for the problem.

CURT NICKISCH: What if is really good. Examples of this are also what other scenarios might exist? Could we do this differently? That’s a way of just asking a simple question, but trying to open up a brand new avenue of thinking or problem solving.

ARNAUD CHEVALLIER: Exactly. And by doing this, you’re really expanding the space in which you operate. Investigative, you go deep. And speculative, you go wide, and you’re stretching a little bit the universe of possibilities.

CURT NICKISCH: Now, productive is the next type. Tell us about that.

ARNAUD CHEVALLIER: Yeah. Investigative, you go deep. Speculative, you go wide. If you’re a professor, that’s all you have to do. You can spend years and years on your problem but if you actually have a real job, chances are you’re asked to have some results, right? So productive is the now what questions. You’re adjusting the pace of the effort, deciding whether you know enough to move forward right away or perhaps deciding that you need to slow down a little bit before you make those decisions, to give you a chance to get even more insight into your problem.

CURT NICKISCH: Examples here that you list in your article are things like, do we have the resources to move ahead? Do we know enough to proceed? Are we ready to decide? Very tactical and the sorts of questions that bring everybody back to the realization of what needs to happen.

ARNAUD CHEVALLIER: That’s right. How are we doing across compared to project plan and should we accelerate or should we slow down?

CURT NICKISCH: I can definitely see certain types of managers would be really good at this. There are roles sometimes that are very operational or process oriented, and you almost have a traffic police officer managing a process, yeah. Interpretive was the next type.

ARNAUD CHEVALLIER: Investigative, what’s known. Speculative, what if? Productive, now what? All these gets me some information about my decision, about my problem. But information is one thing, but it’s not quite wisdom. The fourth type, the interpretative questions, the “so what” helps us convert that information into insight.

CURT NICKISCH: Examples here are questions like how does this fit with that goal? What are we trying to achieve – that really gets at so what? What did we learn from this new information? This seems very helpful at a transition point where you’ve … I don’t know, you’ve gotten customer data back or you have new information to process.

ARNAUD CHEVALLIER: I love how you phrased it because this is also what we’re discovering, the “so what” helps you transition from one type of question to another. So the five why’s, why aren’t we having better revenues? Because our clients are not buying enough of our products. Okay, so what? Maybe then that will help me transition from being investigative, asking why, to perhaps being speculative, thinking about how else we could get our clients to buy our products. It enables you to transition from one type to another.

CURT NICKISCH: Now, the last type of strategic question that you identify in your taxonomy is subjective, which was really interesting to me because it wasn’t one of the sorts of questions I expected to jump out in a strategy framework. Tell us a little bit more about subjective questions.

ARNAUD CHEVALLIER: Maybe it’s helpful to explain how we got to the first four types. We were very happy when we got there, we figured it was really clicking and then we had the catchy way of thinking about it. It’s four types but there are really three main ones, like the three Musketeers, that sort of thing. We thought we were done and then we started interviewing top leaders, people in charge of billion-dollar operations. And there was something else, and maybe this is best exemplified by this wonderful little cartoon by Jack Ziegler in the New Yorker a few years ago, where you see a little fish happily swimming around minding its own business, not realizing that right behind it there’s a huge fish about to eat it alive. And the small one is called agenda, and the big one is called hidden agenda. The last type of questions, subjective questions, are just realizing that we’re dealing with people. People have emotions, they have political agendas, and if we don’t embrace this we might just miss entirely what the problem is actually all about.

CURT NICKISCH: Examples of these questions are how do you really feel about this decision? Have we consulted the right people? Those are all things that do get at those emotions and just the real impact of business decisions.

ARNAUD CHEVALLIER: Right on. I remember specifically we were interviewing the CEO of a major airplane manufacturer. And brilliant fellow, mid 40s, everything … Former engineer, I think. We were expecting him to be very investigative. Nothing against engineers, I’m one myself. But turns out that he was saying after every big meeting he would sit down and reflect on was there a difference between what was said, what was heard, and what was meant? To him, what really mattered was that human component in the meeting.

CURT NICKISCH: Now that we have these five types, let’s go through some of the advice that you have in your article. Number one, is you really want people to understand what questions they tend to ask or what their own interrogatory typology is. Talk more about that.

ARNAUD CHEVALLIER: I think it’s fair to say that we all develop our question mix, the questions that have served us well, that we believe will serve us well in the future. I remember for example, interviewing the COO of a major car company. And he’s telling us how on Monday morning he meets his team and he’s asking them, “How was your weekend?”

But he also made it very clear that when he’s asking how was your weekend, he doesn’t want to hear about little Timmy’s baseball game, he wants to know whether we shipped on time, if there’s any issues with the manufacturers. In other words, he is in full productive mode. And that makes a lot of sense. Again, he’s a COO. His job is to get things moving. But we can also imagine that he’s doing such a good job at the COO level that he might be offered the CEO position. And here, if he’s using the same mix that is predominantly into productive, he might not see other areas, he might develop some blind spots.

CURT NICKISCH: And so number one, you can learn to mix it up yourself by understanding your type, basically keeping track of the questions that you ask and making a concerted effort to ask different kinds of questions so that you expand your repertoire. That’s one way to get started.

ARNAUD CHEVALLIER: Maybe another way is also to take the LQM test, the leaders question mix test that we are putting together on the IMD website. It takes five minutes and you’re given two batches of questions, and you tell us which one you prefer. And as a result, we help you identify what your preferred mix is. And back to your point, Curt, my preferred mix is one thing but I shouldn’t be … I need to realize as well that there are other questions, including some that I’m not familiar or comfortable with, and that what matters is not so much my preference, as much as what is needed for the specific decision or specific problem I’m facing.

CURT NICKISCH: So if you’ve assessed your current question style, you start to adjust your repertoire, it’s still a lot to keep track of. When you’re in conversations, it’s easy to remember afterwards, why didn’t I ask that question? While you’re in it, especially if it’s a heated exchange or a very pithy conversation, it’s hard to just do this in real time on the fly, really well.

So what advice do you have for somebody to practically keep track, and expand their repertoire, but also make sure that they’re not missing anything and that they still don’t have blind spots even after they try to expand the zone in that way?

ARNAUD CHEVALLIER: I think you’re describing situations that we see often with executives. And one way of doing this is by taking the LQM, the leader question mix assessment, you also get a list of questions. And you can take that list with you, especially if there are some types of questions you realize you don’t ask very naturally. You can also pick a couple of those ahead of the meeting, making a mental or written note to ask those questions over there and see what happens with those.

CURT NICKISCH: Does this work at all levels of the organization or are we really talking about leaders asking strategic questions?

ARNAUD CHEVALLIER: We’ve applied it at all levels, absolutely, and in fact what we’ve found is in teams it works even better, realizing first that we have different mixes and then identifying, so what? Being interpretive: what are we going to do with the fact that you and I, Curt, have different mixes? If I’m terrible at one type, for instance speculative, maybe I need to rely on my teammates who are better there. Or at the very least, learn to recognize the value of speculative questions, at least in some settings, not shutting down the door the moment I hear a speculative question.

CURT NICKISCH: And one point you make in the article too is that you can find people on your team to help compensate for you if you know that you have certain weaknesses. Let’s talk a little bit about the difficulty of asking questions though in business settings, because when you ask a question, in some ways you’re putting people on the spot. What advice do you have for managers and leaders asking questions in these settings where you can ask penetrating and provocative questions but not make them feel so hard edged?

ARNAUD CHEVALLIER: Yeah. I think, again, you’re putting your finger on it because if you’re the authority figure and you ask, “Why did you do this?” Chances are the person on the receiving end of that is going to feel threatened. There is what we ask and there is how we ask it and how we phrase it. And what we found with those leaders who are particularly good with these subjective kinds of questions is they’re very conscious of the way they ask things. For instance, you might not ask why did you do this, but perhaps what happened?

CURT NICKISCH: Can you give us some examples of where these questions or changing your mix, asking different types of questions, yeah, being more deliberate in your question asking, how that can lead to better business results?

ARNAUD CHEVALLIER: Well, my favorite of course is a Swiss cliche. IMD professors will tell you, of course we’ll bring it back to the Swiss army knife. And your mix really is a Swiss army knife. You should be able not to have just one blade but you have different mixes of questions and you use the mix that best fits whichever situations you’re in.

Take the example of an airline captain who’s about to land at Geneva airport. If I’m in the back of the plane, I do not want the captain to start thinking speculative questions. “Hey, what if I turn this knob here? What if I try to land the plane in a different way?” No, no, no, no. Her job at that time is to land the plane, be productive. You take the time you to decide, no more, no less, and you just get it done. But that same captain maybe a few minutes before might have to deal with an issue, maybe a passenger who had drunk too much alcohol and started to act up, and maybe she needed to on the spot think creatively and perhaps using seat belts to restrain the passenger.

And perhaps even earlier in the day when she first met the first officer who was going to assist her on the flight, she needed to create quickly an environment where they could work well together. She maybe needed to be very subjective in her question mix. We can see how the same person on the same job might have to fundamentally alter her mix just to be effective at all three decision points.

CURT NICKISCH: You also have a lot of good examples in the article of companies that … Or leaders that didn’t ask a certain type of question, and that led to a huge problem.

ARNAUD CHEVALLIER: Mmhmm. Being French, we can make fun of the SNCF who built …

CURT NICKISCH: This is the French rail company.

ARNAUD CHEVALLIER: That’s right. They ordered 15 billions worth of trains and design spec’d them on the assumption that all platforms were some standard size, only to realize that all the platforms, all 1300 of them were actually larger, needed to be respec’d. And I think in hindsight, it’s always easy to make fun and to look at deficiencies in the decision process.

However, we probably can safely assume that engineers on the problem did their utmost to get it done. Really, five question types as a way perhaps of having a checklist, of reducing the chances of having blind spots in our decision process, but realizing that those blind spots can happen even to the best organizations out there, and realizing then that if we’re not mindful about the questions we ask, we might just every now and then fail to check an important question category.

CURT NICKISCH: One question that you suggest asking is, “are we all okay with this?” Which is a powerful question. It also presupposes that you’ve got the psychological safety on the team for everybody to be able to speak up. So, questioning and asking the right questions at the right time still demands an awareness of the culture that you’re asking it in, and how these questions are going to come across, and whether you’ve created the climate for people to be able to give you the powerful answers that you’re asking for.

ARNAUD CHEVALLIER: This is a very good point. And we’ve worked with organizations where there was very little psychological safety, where admitting that anything might be less and perfect might be a big, big issue. And in those settings it’s much more challenging but there are ways of still eliciting the wisdom of the group.

One such way for instance, is to use pre-mortems and to project the organization, say, “Okay, let’s go with this decision. Let’s assume that we are picking option one and we are now three years from today and we realize it’s a total fiasco. It crashed down. What happened?” And that can help people who would probably not ask questions frontally, to put on the table some less than perfect aspects of the decision they’re seeing.

CURT NICKISCH: Yeah, that’s very clever. What could go wrong? What did go wrong with this fiasco? It’s almost like this article is giving advice for how to speak, how to talk. Asking a question, it’s a conversational device. And it might seem too basic to people, why is this important and why is this especially important now?

ARNAUD CHEVALLIER: Well, questions are ways to make better decisions. We’ve all heard it, asking better questions is a way forward. We probably all develop our own mix of questions, those questions that we like, but there might be three issues associated with that. First, how do you know that your mix is a good mix? Second, when you’re asking a question, especially under time pressure, you’re not asking another type of question. There’s a cost of opportunity of asking a specific question. And are you sure that you’re using the best question for the job? And third, maybe you mix got you here but if that means that you’re doing such a good job here, you’re getting promoted, then tomorrow’s universe for you is not the same as yesterday. How do you adapt your question mix to help you be successful in the future?

CURT NICKISCH: And is there anything different about today’s business climate or the oncoming opportunity with artificial intelligence, that amplifies the ability to ask questions?

ARNAUD CHEVALLIER: I think you’re spot-on. GenAI, especially since late 2022, enables you to be a sparring partner or to have a sparring partner in having back and forth. You can indeed have a conversation with the database now, and you can’t have that conversation by proposing answers. You need to be asking questions. Clearly asking more insightful questions might unlock some value you couldn’t otherwise.

CURT NICKISCH: So for a speculative question, what does that look like in a real business setting?

ARNAUD CHEVALLIER: You hear mid managers who are often risk-averse, and then you speak with their boss and the boss is always asking for taking more risk. And you can rationalize it from both sides. Because the boss has a portfolio of a project and if some of those fail, no big deal. But if I’m the manager in charge of a project and I have it fail, then pretty quickly I start thinking that people associate me with failure. And so asking what if, having that conversation between the top team and the manager saying, “What if we didn’t care about failure? What if we were looking for – each of us managers, some of us having some failure? What if we relaxed this constraint or that constraint?” – can help us realize and realign what would be individual objectives with organizational ones.

CURT NICKISCH: Do you remember any good stories from the executives that you talked to where asking some of these subjective, what’s unsaid questions really opened up new opportunities or changed things?

ARNAUD CHEVALLIER: Yeah. And this one really gets to the human dimension. If you ask me next Monday morning how I’m doing, and I reply, fine, fine can be a number of things. Fine can be my dog died yesterday. Or fine, can be life is beautiful. What we found with some of the execs who were really good at going to the essence of it is probing in a caring way to understand the meaning behind the words, what’s kept unsaid, and remembering that you have short post people and you have long post people, some people will say fine as just an introductory but if you give them a little bit more time, they might actually expand and through that unlock a set of information you wouldn’t have had access to.

CURT NICKISCH: Arnaud, I have to ask, you’ve done all this research, I’m curious if you have a favorite question that you never asked before that you’ve come out of this process with that you use in your work and your job.

ARNAUD CHEVALLIER: Putting me on the spot, huh.

CURT NICKISCH: A little bit.

ARNAUD CHEVALLIER: I really fell in love with that difference between what was said, what was heard, and what was meant. I really think this is something I need to be better at and reading the weak signals and understanding what’s behind the words. But whenever I take the test, and I’ve taken it several times, what comes out is I am terrible at productive questions. So maybe, just maybe I need to pay more attention to the pace of my decision making.

CURT NICKISCH: For a manager who’s not a leader yet, hasn’t developed their repertoire per se, what advice would you give to them? What can they do tomorrow to start asking more strategic and stronger questions?

ARNAUD CHEVALLIER: My advice to someone who feels they don’t have yet a mix is, first of all, you probably already have a mix. There’s probably a couple of questions that you’ve seen or heard and they feel very insightful. But maybe you want to do as I do, is I keep track. All the questions I hear on your podcast and elsewhere that I haven’t heard before, I keep a long list and then I categorize them under the five buckets and I have my favorite ones.

CURT NICKISCH: Arnaud, thanks so much for coming on the show and sharing this research with us.

ARNAUD CHEVALLIER: My pleasure, thanks for having me.

CURT NICKISCH: That’s Arnaud Chevallier, a professor at IMD Business School and a co-author of the HBR article, the Art of Asking Smarter Questions.

And we have nearly 1000 episodes plus more podcasts to help you manage your team, your organization and your career. Find them at HBR.org/podcasts or search HBR and Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen.

Thanks to our team, senior producer Mary Dooe, associate producer Hannah Bates, audio product manager Ian Fox, and senior production specialist Rob Eckhardt. Thank you for listening to the HBR IdeaCast . We’ll be back with a new episode on Tuesday, I’m Curt Nickisch.

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