Education researcher Lixiang Yan, who teaches at Tsinghua University in Beijing, discovered earlier this year that students could hand over all the assignments for his course to AI. Yan was using an AI agent called Codex to set up an online course when he realised that the AI could complete all the assignments on its own, answer questions and take part in discussions “without the learner engaging intellectually at all”. The experience led him to believe that teaching students to think for themselves “is more critical than ever”.
In a 2025 survey of more than 1,000 US professors conducted by the American Association of Colleges and Universities, 90% said they believed generative AI would reduce students’ critical thinking skills. In a global survey of more than 8,000 higher education students, around 20% of those using AI said they were already struggling to solve problems without it. Cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham of the University of Virginia explains that “learning happens as a result of cognitive processing”, which usually requires effort, “and that is exactly what AI removes”.
Science is a field particularly threatened by large language models, researchers say. Thomas Nygren, who studies education and critical thinking at Uppsala University in Sweden, warns that “there is a risk that students will outsource precisely the activities through which scientific thinking develops: formulating hypotheses, interpreting evidence, considering alternatives and dealing with uncertainty”. Stéphan Vincent-Lancrin, who led a decade-long programme on critical thinking at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in Paris, argues that building critical and higher-order thinking skills “has become even more important”.
Definitions of critical thinking vary. Willingham calls it “a kind of catch-all term” covering situations in which people think well. Cognitive researchers prefer to talk about separate higher-order processes, such as memory, reasoning, decision-making and problem-solving, which involve different but overlapping mechanisms in the brain. One important shared strategy is the ability to consider alternative perspectives, as a scientist does when weighing different hypotheses. However, critical thinking requires knowledge and skills in the relevant field: neurologists, for example, are not particularly good at diagnosing heart conditions, as one study showed.
Concerns about students’ intellectual skills are not new. In 1983, a report by the US National Commission on Excellence in Education warned that many 17-year-olds lacked the “higher-order intellectual skills” they should have had. In recent decades, critical thinking has become a goal for many education systems: UNESCO now considers it an educational priority, and it is included in school curricula in almost all OECD countries.
Vincent-Lancrin gives the example of a lesson in which pupils investigate the causes of type 2 diabetes, revising their ideas as they learn about different perspectives, such as the contribution of genes and environmental factors. However, this does not mean the goal is being achieved. Willingham says pessimistically that “there is not much reason to believe we did an excellent job” of teaching critical thinking in the past, “and now AI has come along and destroyed what we had achieved”.
A 2024 study showed that secondary school pupils were better at solving maths problems when they had access to generative AI like ChatGPT, but once it was taken away, they performed worse than those who had never had access to the tool. Overall, research does not yet clearly show what effect generative AI has on learning and critical thinking, because the tools are relatively new and varied, studies have produced conflicting findings, and rigorous or long-term research is lacking. Yan, who reviewed the literature, says that “the tools can help, but they can also have a negative effect; in fact, both are true”.
Some studies suggest that AI supports learning when it provides feedback or tasks that encourage the learner to think, instead of ready-made answers. However, when Yan asked students to use an AI designed to challenge their thinking, some turned it off and switched to ChatGPT.
To better understand AI’s effect, the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) in London announced in June that it would spend up to £2.5 million (US$3.4 million) on rigorous studies of the effects of generative AI on learning, comprehension, memory and problem-solving. Willingham thinks it is good that someone is conducting these studies, although he expects the results to be bleak: “It will take time to see this decline, but the decline seems fairly inevitable”.
The fact that critical thinking varies by field is one reason it is difficult to teach. Educational psychologist Paul Kirschner of the Open University of the Netherlands stresses that “it is not general and free-floating; you have to teach it within specific subjects”. In history, he says, critical thinking may require cross-checking records and artefacts, while in science it may require understanding the relationships between theory, hypothesis, method and evidence. Furthermore, recognising abstract reasoning strategies is difficult: a pupil may learn the difference between correlation and causation in class, but fail to recognise it when encountering it in the real world.
Willingham recommends that teachers identify the most important reasoning skills, incorporate them into curricula and provide plenty of practice, including problems of different types. Kirschner adds that a coherent curriculum is needed to build knowledge, skills and critical thinking across different subjects and over the years.
The OECD programme led by Vincent-Lancrin, which involved around 800 teachers, was one of the largest efforts to examine the teaching of critical thinking in schools and develop materials, such as sample lesson plans. Vincent-Lancrin acknowledges that there is little rigorous evidence about what works best, partly because these skills are harder to measure in a standardised way than maths or reading, and the OECD is now working with education company Macat to develop a standardised assessment.
Comments