#31. My Attempts to Improve Critical Thinking in Higher Education

I strove to overcome students’ beliefs that they are not allowed to think and, in the process, created more playful courses.

Feb 15, 2024

Dear friends,

In Letter #30 I suggested that colleges and universities are, ideally, places for mental play. To play mentally is to play with ideas. Another term for it is critical thinking.

College administrators often claim that the main benefit of a college education is a gain in critical thinking. But systematic studies—using tests of critical thinking skills at the beginning and end of the four-year college experience--reveal that such gains are quite small overall and nonexistent for approximately 45% of students (Arem & Ropsksa, 2011). Moreover, some studies indicate that colleges became even less effective in improving critical thinking beginning around 1990 than they had been before (Huber & Kuncel, 2016; Pascarella & Terenzini 2005). I’ve so far been unable to find any evidence that critical thinking improves over four years of college more than it would have, in the same or similar people, if they had spent those years doing something else. In a survey by PayScale Inc., published a few years ago, 50% of employers complained that the college graduates they hire aren’t ready for the workplace, and the primary reason they gave is lack of critical thinking skills (Belkin, 2017).

As I pointed out in Letter #30, our educational practices in primary and secondary school are almost perfectly designed to suppress critical thinking. Students learn that the goal is to come up with the answer the teacher wants or the test deems correct, the one that has been “taught.” Original thinking is likely to result in a lower grade than achieved by pure regurgitation. Increasingly in recent decades, these same methods have come to predominate in colleges as well as in primary and secondary schools.

When I was teaching undergraduates, years ago, my primary goal was to encourage critical thinking. Our testing and grading system has trained students not to think, but to memorize and regurgitate. Critical thinking is play; memorizing and regurgitating are not. Critical thinking is playing with ideas. We turn them upside down to see what happens, contrast them with other ideas to look for consistencies or contradictions, try them out on other people to get their reactions, and so on. Students come into the class believing they don’t have permission to think. They are mere students, so their job is to “learn,” not think, and learning means memorizing and regurgitating. To disrupt this ingrained school-induced habit and encourage thinking I developed what I call the idea approach to organizing and leading courses, which I describe below (for more complete descriptions, see Gray, 1993, 1997). Instead of focusing on facts, I focused on ideas, which, by definition, are things to think about.

Application of the Idea Approach to a Large Lecture Class

Here’s how I brought the idea approach to my introductory psychology course, where there were typically 150 to 200 students. On the first day of class I would open with something like the following:

“What is Psychology? It’s not a set of facts or names and beliefs of famous psychologists. It’s a set of ideas. It’s a set of ideas about the human mind and human behavior, about how we humans tick. What’s an idea? It’s something to think about. It’s something that could be true or not, or perhaps more often is in some ways true and some ways not. You probably already have some ideas about the human mind and behavior, and it will be interesting to think about them as you go through the course. Facts are specific, objective observations. They are only interesting in this course to the degree that they help us verify, reject, or qualify an idea. Famous psychologists are only interesting in this course to the degree that it can be fun to know who came up with some of the ideas we are talking about and what evidence they provided for those ideas.”

Notice that I could have said that this course is about theories in psychology, but theories is too highfalutin a word. Students, especially in the introductory course, might think they are incapable of theories, but everyone has ideas. I assigned my own textbook, which I wrote specifically to focus on what I took to be the main ideas in psychology, and I used lectures largely to address ideas that the students themselves expressed, or their questions about the ideas in the book.

Even with this big class, I empowered students to play a large role in what I talked about. For example, before giving a lecture on the psychology of sleep and dreams, I would ask students, at the end of a class period, to jot down and hand in their ideas about the following: Why do we sleep (i.e., what purpose does sleep serve)? Why do we dream? Can we learn anything about a person from their dreams? This would be before most had read the chapter on sleep and dreams (almost nobody reads chapters in advance). Then I would do a quick qualitative analysis of what they wrote and devote the next lecture to discussing the most common ideas they came up with. In my discussion, I would bring in research evidence concerning each idea and maybe ask for thoughts about how one might do a study to gain more evidence for or against the idea. I attempted to model critical thinking as I critiqued the students’ ideas.

One day each week the class met in small separate discussion groups, each led by an advanced undergraduate student while I circulated. The purpose of each meeting was to discuss the pros, cons, and limitations of one or more of the ideas that had been presented that week, based on their own experiences in the world as well as their reading of the chapter. To aid discussion, students were required to bring to the group written, thoughtful questions, in paragraph form, about at least one of the ideas to be discussed. I would circulate among the groups and offer a thought if asked.

I can’t say that this approach worked for everyone, but it worked for most. I found them really thinking about the ideas and taking some ownership of their learning in the course. There was a degree of personal empowerment and permission that, I think, is the first step toward academic play. Some told me that they had, on their own initiative, applied the idea approach to their thinking in other courses. The courses became more enjoyable and interesting to them when they thought about ideas instead of just facts to regurgitate on a test. Some said they even did better on factual tests because of that. The ideas led to engagement and the facts became more meaningful and memorable.

Application of the Idea Approach to a Smaller Class or Seminar

Once, about midway through my teaching career, I had the experience of walking down hallways looking into one classroom after another. What I saw, in room after room, was one person (the professor) up on the stage, often quite animated, and a bunch of others (the students) in seats looking quite bored. Hmm, I thought, what might I do to get the students on the stage and me in a seat?

So, the next semester I tried a new approach in my relatively small course (about 30 students) in evolutionary psychology. I chose the most interesting readings I could find—books and articles filled with provocative, research-based ideas about human behavior from a Darwinian perspective. I told students at the beginning that the assignment, for each course meeting, was to come to class with written thought questions (thoughtful questions, in paragraph form, which might include disagreements) concerning what they found to be the most interesting ideas in the assigned readings. Each meeting would then be led by a pair of students—a different pair each meeting—who would be on the stage. They would start by presenting what they viewed as the most interesting ideas in the readings and then chair the rest of the meeting, as students read out their thought questions for discussion. I sat with the other students, inconspicuously in the middle of the room. I told the students early in the course that I would share my thoughts on any question if asked, but only if asked.

At first the questions and discussion seemed a bit strained, but by the third or fourth week the students were into it. They came enthusiastically with ideas and critiques. The discussion was lively, and I observed real debate, critical thinking, and even laughter as students loosened up enough to joke about some of the ideas or the ways researchers had tested them. Two or three times in a course meeting, sometimes more, someone would ask, “So, Peter (I had by that time gotten them to call me by my first name), what do you think about this?” Then, and only then, I might present some knowledge or thought I had relevant to the question. Students loved the course, and so did I. I think part of the success came from reducing my role as an authority figure, which had the effect of empowering others to debate and think—that is, to play. What a pleasure it was to me to present my thoughts and information only when asked, not to force them on the students.

Doing Rather Than Just Lecturing

Play, by definition, is active. It’s always mentally active and often physically active as well. So, sometimes in my large lecture class, I would perform a little experiment or demonstration. For example, before lecturing on the psychological phenomenon of group polarization I would conduct a class demonstration in which I asked students to rank their belief about something on a 10-point scale—from strongly disagree to strongly agree. For example, I might ask if the next test in the course should be in multiple choice rather than essay format. Then I’d separate the class into small groups of students who had similar views on the issue. Some groups were of those who favored essays and others were of those who favored multiple-choice. I asked them to discuss the question within their group and then, after about 15 minutes, I brought them back to their seats and asked them to rate, again, the strength and direction of their preference. They handed in their ranking sheets, and I analyzed them before the next class meeting.

The result invariably, which I reported at the next class meeting, was that those who favored essays before the group discussion favored them even more strongly after it, and those who favored multiple choice favored that even more after the discussion. This is the phenomenon of group polarization. When you talk only with people who tend to agree with you, you become even more extreme than before in your belief. After presenting the results, I asked the class why this occurred, and they came up, on their own, with all the possible explanations that research psychologists have ever presented about this phenomenon. They also came up with ways of testing the differing explanations. They were truly thinking like scientists. Moreover, they easily recognized how this could explain how political polarization occurs, when liberals only talk to liberals and conservatives only talk to conservatives.

A Playful, Thought-Producing Way of Teaching Statistics

Finally, let me say something about my teaching of statistics. My experience is that most students, even at the relatively selective college where I was teaching, are math phobic. They don’t understand math concepts because they think they can’t and are afraid to try. They just memorize and apply procedures, and that has generally worked for them in school. This is true even of those who got straight A in high school math courses. They got the As because they could memorize and follow procedures, not because they understood what they were doing. To promote thinking, I began my statistics course by having the students fill out a questionnaire (anonymously) that asked for lots of information, including their gender, height, political inclination (Democrat, Republican, other), average grade in high-school math, degree of self-perceived math phobia, etc. etc. Then I gave them all the data, in a form, of course, that did not include students’ names.

As we went through the course, I would ask various questions relevant to the data on that large questionnaire and get people’s initial beliefs. As examples: Are the women in the course more math phobic, by their own accounts, than the men? Is there any relationship between self-reported math phobia and performance on our most recent class test? Are tall people more likely to be Republicans than short people? If so, is this confounded by gender (because men are on average taller than women)? Then I would ask if people could think of any ways to address the question just asked, using the data we had collected and the statistical procedures we were studying. And then I’d ask students, as homework, to do those calculations and come back with their findings. By doing the course this way, students understood the reasons for the statistical procedures we were going through and found them to be interesting and useful. It was also fun to see whose guesses were supported or not by the data analyses. The students seemed to learn something of the joy of statistics, not just procedures.

Final Thoughts

I’m always curious to know what readers think of what I write in these letters. This whole substack thing is, for me, an exercise in critical thinking, and I hope it is for you too. So, I welcome thoughtful disagreements as well as confirming thoughts. Feel free to share your experiences with courses at any level of schooling—whether as teacher or student—that bear on what I have presented here. By doing so you will improve this letter for everyone.

Play Makes Us Human

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