Critical Thinking: Why Is It So Hard to Teach?

How I found it

Saved via a November 2026 X post: Deep Psychology (@DeepPsycho_HQ) quoting a ten-part thread by Praxis (@praxiss) summarising the article. Both are archived on Lock yourself in a… (tweet).

Key claims

• The calls are old and the results are poor. A Nation At Risk (1983) said many 17-year-olds lacked “higher-order” intellectual skills; by 1990 most states had critical-thinking initiatives, and one program, Tactics for Thinking, sold 70,000 teacher guides. “But, for reasons I’ll explain, the programs were not very effective.”
• What cognitive scientists mean by it. Critical thinking is a subset of three kinds of thinking (reasoning, making judgments and decisions, and problem solving), distinguished by three features: effectiveness, novelty, and self-direction.
• Surface structure beats deep structure. In one experiment subjects solved a garden-vegetables problem, then got a band-marching problem with the same least-common-multiple math. “Yet, few subjects—just 19 percent—saw” that the earlier solution applied. Readers interpret a problem through what it is about, which makes reading faster and the underlying structure harder to see.
• Familiarity is what makes transfer work. Most American college students solved a puzzle about escaping a cave by leaving a trail of sand; the experimenters attributed this to growing up with Hansel and Gretel. Chinese students did far worse, and the results reversed on a problem based on a Chinese folk tale. “It takes a good deal of practice with a problem type before students know it well enough to immediately recognize its deep structure.”
• Children and scientists. The research on scientific reasoning “has been summarized simply: Children are not as dumb as you might think, and adults (even trained scientists) are not as smart as you might think.” Young children can work out which block sets off a “blicket detector,” while “Even trained scientists are open to pitfalls in reasoning about conditional probabilities,” and “Physicians are known to discount or misinterpret new patient data that conflict with a diagnosis they have in mind.”
• Metacognitive strategies help, but only so far. Maxims like “look for a problem’s deep structure” or “consider both sides of an issue” are “little chunks of knowledge” that make critical thinking more likely, but “the ability to think critically (to actually do what the metacognitive strategies call for) depends on domain knowledge and practice.”
• Critical-thinking programs show modest gains at best. Reviewers he cites conclude some programs have some positive effect, with two caveats: “the success of the program depends on the skill of the teacher,” and “thinking programs look good when the outcome measure is quite similar to the material in the program.”

The conclusion, in his words

First, critical thinking (as well as scientific thinking and other domain-based thinking) is not a skill. There is not a set of critical thinking skills that can be acquired and deployed regardless of context. Second, there are metacognitive strategies that, once learned, make critical thinking more likely. Third, the ability to think critically (to actually do what the metacognitive strategies call for) depends on domain knowledge and practice. For teachers, the situation is not hopeless, but no one should underestimate the difficulty of teaching students to think critically.

His classroom advice, from the sidebar: critical thinking “shouldn’t be taught on its own,” should be “modeled for students,” and its strategies should be made explicit, named, and practiced across at least two examples so students learn to spot when one applies.

How it connects

• Critical Thinking and Metacognition: the essay’s central distinction between the strategies (teachable) and the ability to apply them (knowledge-bound).
• The Science of Learning: another Willingham-adjacent page on how learning actually works.
• Daniel Willingham: author.