Audio long read: How to stay smart in the age of AI — the science of critical thinking

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1:39This is an audio long read from Nature. In this episode, how to stay smart in the age of AI. The science of critical thinking. Written by Helen Pearson and read by me, Benjamin Thompson. Earlier this year, education researcher Li Xiangyin realised that students could outsource all of their work for his university course to artificial intelligence. Yen, who teaches at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, was using an agentic AI called Codex to set up an online course on a learning management platform. But it quickly became clear that the adept AI could independently complete all the assignments, answer questions, and participate in discussions, quote, without the learner being intellectually engaged, end quote, at all, Yen says.

2:32The experience made Yen think that teaching students to reason and think for themselves, quote, is more critical than ever, he says. And he is hardly alone. In a 2025 survey of more than 1 ,000 US faculty members conducted by the American Association of Colleges and Universities, 90 % said they thought that generative AI will reduce students' critical thinking skills. Around 20 % of higher education students who use AI said that they already find it harder to work through problems without it, according to more than 8 ,000 respondents to a global survey this year. Learning happens as a consequence of cognitive processing, Cognitive processing is typically effortful, and that's what AI effectively removes, says cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

3:26Quote, people are really worried about that, end quote. And science, in which people need to critically evaluate theories and data, is one important area that's under threat from the AI revolution in large language models, or LLMs. There is a risk that students outsource precisely the activities through which scientific thinking develops, formulating hypotheses, interpreting evidence, considering alternatives, and struggling with uncertainty, says Thomas Negrin, who studies education and critical thinking at Uppsala University in Sweden. But all is not lost. Specialists in education and cognition have been studying critical thinking and how to develop it for years, and some have useful tips on how to stay cognitively sharp in the age of AI.

4:16The building of critical thinking and higher-order thinking skills have become even more important, says Stéphane Vincent-Lancrin, who led a 10-year programme on critical thinking at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the OECD, in Paris. Ask five people to define critical thinking and you'll get five different replies. Quote, critical thinking is sort of the pinnacle, end quote, of human cognition, says Willingham. Quote, it's kind of a basket term that captures instances in which people are thinking well, end quote. One reason for the very definitions is that the term is used widely in education and everyday discourse, but less by researchers who study cognition.

5:03Instead, they talk of separate high-level processes such as memory, reasoning, decision-making and problem solving, which involve differing but overlapping mechanisms in the brain. Some general strategies are common in critical thinking, say researchers. An important one is the ability to consider alternative possibilities or perspectives to our own, as a scientist would when weighing up different hypotheses. But practising critical thinking requires skills and knowledge in the relevant domain, so being able to do it in one field doesn't mean someone can in another. Neurologists, for example, are not particularly good at diagnosing cardiology cases, as one study showed.

5:47Concerns that students are intellectually under par 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 we should expect of them. Over the past few decades, critical thinking has become a goal in many education systems, says Vincent Lancrin. It is now considered an educational priority by the United Nations Cultural Organization, UNESCO, and is part of school curricula in almost all OECD countries. He points to the example of a course in which students investigate the causes of type 2 diabetes, revising their ideas as they learn about different perspectives, such as the contributions of genes and environmental influences to the disease.

6:41But this doesn't mean the goal is being met. Quote, There is not much reason to think we were doing a fabulous job, end quote, of teaching critical thinking in the past, says Willingham gloomily. Quote, and now AI has come in and wrecked everything that we had achieved, end quote, for students today. Teachers in schools and universities are brimming with stories of students who, they say, are poor at problem-solving and evaluating information themselves because they're outsourcing the work to AI. And some research supports the idea that AI can erode skills. A 2024 study found that secondary school students were better at solving mathematics problems when given access to a chat GPT-like generative AI, but after it was taken away, they performed worse than those who never had access to the tool.

7:32Overall, research does not yet show clearly what impact generative AI is having on learning and critical thinking. This is because AI tools are relatively new and varied. The studies so far are conflicting, and too few rigorous or long-term studies have been done, researchers say. Tools can help, but can also have a negative effect, says Yen, who has assessed the literature. Quote, it's actually in both directions, end quote. Some studies suggest that AI tools can help people learn if, rather than supplying ready-baked answers, they give feedback or tasks that encourages students to think and problem-solve.

8:12It's about how we structure the task, Yen says. But Willingham and Yen acknowledge that people tend to seek quick answers rather than using AI in ways that demand hard work. When Yen asked students to use an AI designed to prompt their own thinking, he saw some of them shut it down and switch to ChatGPT instead. It's a bit shocking, but that's the truth, right? He says. Future research might help. In June, the Education Endowment Foundation, the EEF, a non-profit research organisation in London, announced that it would spend up to£2.5 million or US$3.4 million on rigorous studies to investigate the impacts of generative AI on learning, understanding, memory and problem-solving.

9:03It's good someone is doing these studies, Willingham says, although he still expects the outlook to be grim. It's going to take a while before you see this slippage, he says, but the slippage feels pretty inevitable. The fact that critical thinking differs between domains is one reason that teaching it is hard, say researchers. It's not generic and free-floating, you have to teach it within specific subjects, says educational psychologist Paul Kirschner, who is at the Open University of the Netherlands and based in Heerlen. This means giving people the specific knowledge and reasoning skills needed in that field.

9:42In history, thinking critically might involve corroborating records and artefacts, he explains, whereas doing so in science could require an understanding of the relationships between theory, hypothesis, method and evidence. A second problem is that critical thinking often involves recognising reasoning strategies in the abstract, and that's hard. For instance, a student might learn in class about the difference between correlation and causation, but then fail to recognise one being mistaken for the other the next time they see it in the real world. Willingham therefore recommends that teachers work out the reasoning skills that are most important, embed them in curricula and ensure students get plenty of practice, including on problems of different types.

10:32Another important aspect, says Kirchner, is having a coherent curriculum that builds knowledge, skills and critical thinking across different subjects and through the years. The OECD project led by Vincent Lancran was one of the biggest efforts, involving some 800 school teachers to scrutinise critical thinking instructions in schools, and develop and test materials, such as example lesson plans and syllabuses. Vincent Lancran acknowledges that there is not much rigorous evidence on what works best to teach critical thinking. That's partly because the skills are harder to measure in a standardised way, which is necessary to test whether a strategy is working, than are mathematics or reading skills.

11:18The OECD is now working with an education company called Macat in London to develop a standardised assessment of critical thinking for secondary school students and undergraduates. Some researchers are testing critical thinking strategies in randomised trials. One international team developed a course to teach secondary school students how to think critically about health claims. They learn, for instance, that personal anecdotes – it worked for me – are often unreliable and that a treatment needs to be carefully tested to know whether it has an effect. The researchers showed, in randomized trials in Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda, that children who took the course performed better on a test of critical thinking than did those who didn't study it.

12:06One related approach that ample research does show to be effective is metacognition, the ability to think about, plan and monitor your own learning. A child who encounters a maths problem and remembers that checking their answer helps in the past is practising metacognition. The EEF has estimated, from a systematic review of research, that teaching students metacognition strategies is one of the most effective approaches schools can introduce to boost learning, adding eight extra months of progress over a year on average, compared with students who are not taught it. One of the most important critical thinking skills in today's world is the ability to detect inaccurate or misleading information, which is proliferating online.

12:52Many young people are spending hours on social media, but also tend to overestimate their ability to spot false information. One study of nearly 24 ,000 higher education students in the Philippines found that 63 % of respondents were confident they could detect fake news, but only 26 % reliably could. Some researchers are developing teaching methods to help. One approach involves inoculating people against myths and disinformation by showing them examples and tactics used to dupe people, an approach that, some research suggests, can improve teenagers' ability to spot unreliable social media posts.

13:34Another is called lateral reading, which teaches people who land on an unfamiliar website, that of a group making health claims, say, to behave like fact-checkers by leaving and searching for more information about the group from credible sources, which can include Wikipedia. This might reveal that the group is backed by the fast food industry, calling its claims into question. Lateral reading is now being integrated into some US schools, says Sarah McGrew, an education researcher at the University of Maryland College Park, who was involved in conceptualizing the approach. McGrew advises people not to assume that they're smart enough to spot false or AI-generated information on their own.

14:18Turning to other sources to check the veracity of a claim or organization is more effective and faster. We have all of the resources of the internet at our disposal to help us, she says. Critical thinking is not just a classroom lesson for schoolchildren, say researchers. It's a set of lifelong skills that everyone could practice, especially now that AI sorely tempts people to outsource brain work. We need to sort of be hard on ourselves so that we continue being smart, says Negron. One clear message from specialists is that, quote, friction is good, end quote, for learning, says Tanya Lombroso, a psychologist who studies learning and reasoning at Princeton University in New Jersey.

15:03Learning techniques that feel effortful and slow, such as testing, summarising from memory, spacing out learning, thinking through material, generally lead to better recall and understanding than to those that feel easy, such as passively reading through notes, a quick online search, or asking AI. Information found online or supplied by generative AI might actually leave people with the illusion that they understand things. One 2023 study found that people who searched online were more confident in their ability to provide explanations for questions, such as why there are leap years or how zippers work, than were people who read information but did not search.

15:47But when asked to actually explain the concepts, those in the search group were less accurate. To overcome this illusion of understanding, Lombroso suggests that people try explaining things out loud or in writing. That could, quote, help people appreciate what they do and don't know, she says. Another valuable habit, she suggests, is to systematically consider alternative solutions or opposite points of view. A simple example, reminding a teenager that a friend could have not texted back because they're busy or out of battery, rather than assuming they're angry. On the basis of his research, Negrin says he encourages students to reflect on a question and think about their own interpretation and arguments before asking AI and being swayed by its answers.

16:38There's a temptation for parents or teachers to too quickly give the answer, or a way to think about the problem, says Lombroso. But, quote, part of developing critical thinking skills is in the wrestling, she says. More broadly, Negrin argues that, quote, higher and better education for everyone, end quote, including about AI itself and about controversial issues such as vaccines is the route to improved critical thinking, because it would build the extensive subject knowledge required. Researchers tend to look for small interventions that they can test in experiments, Negrin says. But education requires repeated efforts over many years that support the slow pace of human learning, he argues.

17:25We actually should be supporting the big overall knowledge accumulation across the globe, he says.

17:34To read more of nature's long-form journalism, head over to nature.com slash news.

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