critical thinking skills cambridge

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A deep dive into critical thinking (part 1) – what is it and how is it taught?

Life Competencies   Adult Learners   Teens   Young Learners   Insights, Research and Linguistics  

We all agree that critical thinking is important, but there is a lack of consensus about what critical thinking is and how to approach the teaching of it. In this post, we get critical about critical thinking and look at the biases that can affect your thoughts without you even realising! 

Some believe that critical thinking skills can be generalised and applied to different contexts and subjects, and can be taught in a generic way. For example, understanding the links between ideas can be applied to any area of knowledge. Others believe that critical thinking skills can only be taught in the context of a specific subject. For example, the skills used with an opinion article (analysing the arguments, evaluating the evidence, identifying facts etc.) are different from those used with a scientific article, where the skills mentioned may not be as relevant as the application of the scientific method – establishing facts after making an observation, forming a hypothesis, making a prediction, conducting an experiment and analysing the results etc. There are also those who believe some skills are general while others are specific.  

Breaking it down

So, before we can think of how education can help students to develop this skillset, we need to define what we believe critical thinking is and how to best teach it. The general principles are related to the ability of receiving, collecting and analysing information effectively. That is: 

• identifying links between ideas,  
• analysing and evaluating arguments,  
• identifying patterns and relationships,  
• separating what’s necessary from what’s irrelevant in a discussion, 
• identifying gaps in reasoning,  
• and using these skills to form an argument, solve a problem, or reach a conclusion.  

Critical thinking in schools 

In schools, critical thinking is mostly treated as a general skill that can be taught in a generic way. The academic load sure makes adding the teaching of critical thinking a challenge, let alone teaching the specific skills for each subject and area of knowledge. However, there is evidence that it’s very difficult for students to transfer the skills that they apply in one context to another. This supports the idea that there are different critical thinking skills for different areas of knowledge.  

Daniel Willingham, professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia, published a paper in 2019 called ‘How to teach Critical Thinking’, which he wrote for the Department of Education in Australia. He believes that critical thinking is domain-specific – a specific skill related to a specific area of knowledge. He says that different areas of knowledge have different definitions of what it means to know something, and they apply analysis, synthesis, and evaluation in different ways.  

So, does that mean that we can’t teach it as a general skill? Well, according to cognitive scientist Tim Van Gelder, that’s not necessarily true. He wrote an article called ‘Teaching Critical Thinking: Some Lessons From Cognitive Science’. Here, he talked about 6 lessons that summarised all the insights he had while studying critical thinking. 

Without going into the specifics of the first 5 lessons, he explains that becoming an expert in critical thinking is hard and improving these skills takes time. Additionally, we need to have at least some theoretical knowledge about something to be able to think critically about it.  

Van Gelder also said that students improve their critical thinking skills faster when they learn how to present their arguments in maps. Create a visually simple way to see the connections of ideas, reasons, assumptions and objections. This is effective because it helps learners to understand how arguments are constructed.

Critical thinking must be learned 

Personally, I believe thinking critically is not natural. We can’t assume people know how to get information, understand it, question it, and use it effectively. It’s something that can be learned with life experiences and examples from the world around us. And we need to have discipline to incorporate it in our lives. I also believe that we need to have knowledge about something before we can think critically about it.  

As for teaching this honed skill, it’s important to teach students about common sense, open-mindedness, skepticism, reasoning, logic, generalisation, correlation, causality – anything that can help them to develop critical thinking skills. Students must reflect on how their opinions are formed. They should know how they connect and combine assumptions, objections, and facts to form arguments. And finally, I firmly believe that we can’t really think critically unless we are aware of our biases. They can alter our perception of reality, our judgment, and our capacity to make impartial observations. 

In part 2 of this blog, we will explore the different types of biases. What biases should you look out for? How can you avoid them? And what does this mean when applied to critical thinking? Be sure to check it out!

Check out the Cambridge Life Competencies booklet , which focuses on this one particular skill in detail. Read about this competency, download lesson plans and watch a short video on it, in Cambridge researcher Jasmin Silver’s critical thinking blog post .

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