Critical Thinking: Why Is It So Hard to Teach?

By Daniel T. Willingham. 2008

882 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Education

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8fc5d0e6e3b09c13040cb964a213ae22bd06ad4e

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In Developmental and Educational Psychology

In Education

Citations in the corpus

Handbook of Research on Learning and Instruction (2011, background): “Results indicated that novice throwers failed to achieve change in the glenohumeral horizontal abduction angle as a result of adjustments to changes in object weight.”
Metacognition: A Literature Review (2011, neutral): “Definitions of critical thinking vary widely, but common elements of most definitions include the following component skills:  analyzing arguments (Ennis, 1985; Facione, 1990; Halpern, 1998; Paul, 1992);  making inferences using inductive or deductive reasoning (Ennis, 1985; Willingham, 2007; Paul”
Styles of Scientific Reasoning: A Cultural Rationale for Science Education? (2017, background): “While most psychologists today admit that reasoning is knowledge-dependent (Willingham, 2008; Zimmerman, 2007), many have continued to study domain-general reasoning processes in knowledge-lean tasks.”
Enhancement of Students’ Biological Literacy and Critical Thinking of Biology through Socio-Biological Case-Based Learning (2017, background): “Critical thinking is a thinking process that involves higher cognitive processes in information processing to produce new thinking (Choy & Cheah, 2009) through questioning, reasoning, making decisions, and problem-solving (Willingham, 2008).”
Domain Specificity and the Limits of Creativity Theory (2012, background): “Research has suggested that transfer across domains is both difficult to achieve and relatively rare (Willingham, 2002, 2007).”
Debiasing Decisions (2015, background): “Several studies have shown that people do not apply their training to unfamiliar and dissimilar domains because they lack the necessary metacognitive strategies to recognize underlying problem structure (for reviews, see Barnett & Ceci, 2002; Reeves & Weisberg, 1994; Willingham, 2008).”
The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking: Self-Reported Reductions in Cognitive Effort and Confidence Effects From a Survey of Knowledge Workers (2025, positive): “Despite concerns about whether critical thinking can be taught [138], research in education has developed a number of approaches to teaching critical thinking [104, 139], such as structured argumentation exercises [25, 70, 72, 133].”
Key skills for the 21st century: An evidence-based review (2017, background): “Nevertheless, critical thinking researchers tend to agree that a level of background knowledge is imperative for thinking critically (Bailin et al., 1999a; McPeck, 1990; Toplak & Stanovich, 2002; Willingham, 2008).”
The Correlation between Metacognitive Skills and Critical Thinking Skills at the Implementation of Four Different Learning Strategies in Animal Physiology Lectures (2020, background): “Metacognition leads to higher-order thinking skills that involve active control of certain cognitive processes in learning (Howard, 2004; Imel, 2002; Kozikoglu, 2019; Uzuntiryaki-Kondakci & Capa-Aydin, 2013; Willingham, 2007).”
Can Thinking be Taught? Linking Critical Thinking and Writing in an EFL Context (2015, background): “While the cultural debate surrounding critical thinking has been somewhat sidelined, following various studies (McKinley, 2013: 20) which called for defining it as more than just an implicit quality which is incapable of change (Willingham, 2007), the ways in which critical thinking could be encoura”