The science of critical thinking: an academic’s view

Megan Pantelides, Senior Director at Board Intelligence, and Professor of Education Rupert Wegerif discuss the role of AI and education in critical thinking, and why we need a radically different approach to developing our thinking skills.

Below is a transcript of the video.

Megan: Hi, I’m Megan Pantelides, Executive Director of Research here at Board Intelligence. I’m delighted to be joined by Rupert Wegerif. He’s a Professor of Education at the University of Cambridge and founder of the Digital Education Futures Initiative.

Today, Rupert and I are going to discuss critical thinking. It’s a skill that we believe is one of the fundamental building blocks of collective intelligence and of high-performing organisations. And it just happens to have been one of Rupert’s areas of focus.

To kick things off, I alluded to the work that you do. Would you mind sharing a little bit more about what it is that you do and the areas of focus that you have at the moment?

Rupert: Well, I’ve always been really interested in how to teach thinking; my first degree was in philosophy with social anthropology. I was aware that you can learn to think better, and some people do think better than others, and so, I have always explored how we can teach this.

I founded the Journal of Teaching Thinking & Creativity, and I’ve edited handbooks on teaching, thinking, and creativity. I’ve also developed ways to teach children how to think better around computers. So, it was the collaboration between children talking together and the computer, which I thought would lead to better thinking in the curriculum. And indeed, I measured it, and it did.

I’ve now returned to my strong interest in technology. With the Digital Education Futures Initiative here at Cambridge, we’re working on various projects to use generative AI to support dialogues, and thinking through dialogues, and generally to teach thinking again at every level.

Megan: We talked about thinking and critical thinking. What do you think that means? Why do you think it matters? And why have you built your career around it?

Rupert: It’s very challenging because there’s a whole lot of psychology, a whole lot of work on it, but there are also a lot of controversies about it. Increasingly, I’ve come to the view that it’s essentially dialogue. That the best way to teach thinking is by engaging people in dialogue.

But also, that’s what thinking is: holding multiple perspectives in tension together, being able to see things from multiple perspectives, and being able to judge between them even when those perspectives are quite incompatible. You know, when they don’t necessarily add up, how do you handle and manage multiplicity? And that, essentially, is how do you engage effectively in dialogue? But that’s not just overt spoken dialogue. That’s also internal reflection.

Megan: Why study thinking and how we think and how we might become more sophisticated thinkers? And why do you think it matters in a broader context?

Rupert: That’s a deep and profound question. Thinking cannot be isolated from a more holistic challenge that life gives us; ‘how to live well’ is a challenge that we’re all confronted with almost at every moment. And that is a thinking challenge — “Who am I?”, What should I do?” — and I don’t think one can respond to that without thought. Understanding thought therefore goes beyond any kind of narrow description of critical thinking, and it becomes a kind of holistic relationship with the cosmos.

Megan: How do you put that in a curriculum?

Rupert: Well, that’s what the curriculum should be. I mean, what is the curriculum and what is it defined by?

Increasingly, education seems to have been trivialised into learning skills that might help you get a job — which is obviously terribly important, I’m not trying to dismiss it — but education is bigger than that.

It’s also been trivialised with a sense of individualism, that it’s just about your individual well-being. Important as that is, surely education is also about how you become collective. How do you take on your larger society and beyond that, the whole cosmos? Surely, we’re exploring everything. We’re looking not just at society. We’re looking at the atoms. We’re looking at the stars. How do you expand to become in relationship to that whole cosmos?

It’s quite hard to define and make it narrow what we mean by thinking.

Megan: How do you measure one’s ability to think critically? How do you measure the impact of the methods and the techniques that you’re working on?

Rupert: I always felt there’s a big danger in research and education of proxy measures. So, you’re looking for something like intelligence, and you design a test that’s a proxy for it. And then you start teaching to the test. Ultimately, surely, the measure of anything is how successful it is?

So, say we’re talking about thinking in boardrooms and companies. The only measure is going to be the success of the company in some way. And any kind of collaborative problem-solving work, of the kind that is very common in business or in any kind of creative task, involves thinking. By doing it properly, you’re developing thinking, collaborative thinking.

If you’re designing a new widget for a solar lamp, for example, you can compare alternatives, you can explore what they’re doing in other parts of the world. The creativity is in the dialogic process of looking at alternatives and comparing, contrasting, focusing in, generalising. All those sort of moves that are standard in a philosophy seminar are also relevant in engineering or in decision making. But the fundamental skill of dialogue and dialogic thinking is, I think, there at the heart of it.

Megan: I wanted to talk to you about AI. It has potentially significant implications for the things that we ask humans to do with their brains in the future, but I wonder if there’s a role in the here and now for AI to assist with some of that collaborative process that you talked about. It’s very easy to think of problem solving as something that’s done better in groups of people, but I suppose if you don’t have a group of people to do it with, can AI perform that role?

Rupert: It’s fantastic. What’s interesting with generative AI is you are talking to the collective knowledge of humanity. They’ve trawled the internet. They found out what other people have said. They’re just feeding it back to you. It shows that the fundamental dialogic thinking that you’re participating in is collective. It’s relatively unbounded. You’re not just isolated as a thinker.

Learning how to work with it, to ask good questions, is the key. With Human-AI Collective Intelligence (HAICI), education ought to be training people to work effectively with the AI. To use it to do the things that it’s really strong at, so that the collaboration between humans and AI, either as an individual or as a small group, is effective in whatever context you’re in to promote thinking.

Megan: I have heard people talk about AI as, having all of human knowledge at your fingertips, as potentially eradicating or at least diminishing the importance of learning facts. But I guess if you’re talking about thinking as being something that’s contextual, you still need to know a certain amount in order to be able to put things in the right context and interpret what you get back out of whatever dialogue you’re having.

Rupert: Yes, I suppose the inspiration partly comes from Gary Kasparov’s Centaur model. Having been beaten by Deep Blue at chess, he came back with the idea of a human-computer collaboration, where the humans were providing a more creative and intuitive flair, and the computer could do all the data crunching.

And I think that’s where we’re going to in the future. Humans actually do need to set the agenda, they still are needed for the creativity. But the computer is always providing cliches; it can only tell you what other people have already said, it can’t say something new. So, you should learn how to use that incredible memory, and incredible processing power, to explore and develop your new ideas.

Megan: What do you think business leaders can do in terms of how they design their organisations, how they support the development of their people, to help people continue to evolve in this area? Are there things that managers and employers can do to enable people to learn in a lifelong fashion, and to keep developing this skill?

Rupert: Well, I’m sure there are. That capacity to face new challenges and come up with new solutions is what you’re really looking for. And the evidence does suggest that you can teach that from an early age, and that partly the way we’ve been educating people and possibly promoting people is actively going against that kind of creativity. So, it could be supported with the right environments and the right attitudes.

Megan: If you could wave a magic wand and change anything about the way we educate children and young people, so they could get better at doing those things, what would it be?

Rupert: Personally, I struggle to see the point of things like A Levels and GCSEs, of summative tests. I think that if you ask children almost anywhere in the system why they’re doing what they’re doing, they usually say, “oh, we gotta prepare for the exams”. Maybe I’m naive, and I don’t mean to do anything too revolutionary, but I’d like to get rid of all that and try and restore an idea that you’re always learning something because it’s interesting, because it’s useful for other people and for the planet, and you’re trying to understand these issues so that you can take them forward for the future. That’s what education should be at every level.

And I do think the technology could help us now. That might seem like some naive pipe dream, but now with big data you can have a massive monitoring of progress in every direction, you can have portfolios that will reflect what people are doing and what they’re learning. So, we could perhaps get rid of this focus on summative assessment and focus only on formative assessment, i.e. how well are you doing against your goals and against what you’re trying to achieve, in a way that can guide you and help you to improve.

Megan: Or, in a very differently phrased way, it’s the end of the tail wagging the dog.

Rupert: Yeah. Exactly.

Megan: We’re of the belief that good thinking is only really worth doing if you can get it out of your head so that other people can act on it, certainly in a business context. There’s no point coming up with really sophisticated plan if you can’t get those thoughts and those ideas out of your head and either down on paper or verbalised in a way that other people can sign off on, support with resources, or go and do something with. And clarity of communication is an essential part of that, isn’t it?

Rupert: I was very inspired by Wittgenstein, one of my heroes. I’m pretty sure he said anything that’s worth saying can be said simply.

And so, when you see people being incredibly obscure, I wonder if they’re just being defensive. Because, ultimately, thinking is a collective activity, and it is about being useful, about responding to real challenges, real stimuli for collective thought. So, if no one can understand what you’re saying, you’re not really participating in that collective thinking. Because the thinking always takes place in the form of a dialogue, in the form of teamwork to solve problems, that becomes an essential part of it.

There was an interesting study from Anita Woolley at MIT. They looked at lots of different groups and measured collective intelligence in terms of how they could solve a wide range of problems. And the key distinctor between the successful groups and the unsuccessful wasn’t the IQ of individual members, it was precisely the social sensitivity, the ability to communicate. Group communication was at the heart of the collective intelligence. Without clear communication, you don’t have a collectively intelligent group.