The question of “how” to teach critical thinking skills has proven to be elusive, especially in this era of standardized curriculum and test-driven accountability for schools. How can teachers also ensure they’re supporting critical thinking in their students? It turns out they can do this by adding one simple step in their daily routine – a critical thinking challenge or query to kickstart students’ brains and encourage them to better analyze the information before them. 

It turns out that cultivating critical thinking skills can be difficult, even though many educators believe “that’s the point of what we’re training our students to be able to do,” says Ben Motz, a research scientist in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Indiana University.

Perhaps education has been missing a key ingredient when it comes to teaching students to detect faulty reasoning: practice. That’s the hypothesis that Motz and other psychology researchers from Indiana University tested in a study, funded by the Reboot Foundation, whose findings they believe point to a promising method for strengthening critical-thinking muscles.