The use of AI is no longer exclusive to companies and the workforce. Its availability to everyone enables people of all ages to use it for their needs—including education. Students can freely use AI tools like ChatGPT in doing their assignments and research. While this is efficient, it also introduces a new, modern challenge for educators: Does AI hinder or develop one’s thinking skills?
In this article, we’ll explore how you can effectively use AI to enhance students’ critical thinking skills.
The Importance of Critical Thinking
One of the core approaches students take when studying is memorization. They memorize key concepts, familiarize themselves, and begin to understand them. While this is highly important, it’s not the only skill to learn. Critical thinking goes beyond memorizing. It’s a person’s ability to analyze, assess, and make decisions for any situation.
Why is this an important skill? In the real world, spontaneity always rises. Students can always prepare for every scenario or situation. Having the ability to think logically and solve problems is a skill they must be equipped with to survive. They won’t just accept any information at face value. They will ask questions, scrutinize, and do careful thought. Importantly, in today’s world, more information is available to everyone, and not all of it is correct or factual. Having critical thinking skills will ensure the students distinguish, cross-check, and form their own judgments.
How AI Can Develop Critical Thinking
How can AI help foster critical thinking? Here are some real-world examples:
Encouraging Inquiry-Based Learning
While teachers are always the ones talking, this approach encourages students to ask questions. Learners are taught not just to receive the information given to them but to find other solutions and look for different perspectives. AI can help by taking on the role of a virtual tutor or discussion facilitator.
There are AI tutors or chatbots that don’t just give students the answers directly. They guide students by giving thought-provoking questions and breaking the problem down. They may also ask follow-up questions that support students in thinking and understanding the lesson more deeply.
Enhancing Problem-Solving Skills
Problem-solving skills are the core of critical thinking. AI-powered platforms can help students analyze the problem, test hypotheses, predict outcomes, and more. For example, a math AI platform provides a step-by-step solution to a math problem. It doesn’t just give you the final answer. It provides ideas on how to solve the math problem and the calculation steps. You will also get a final answer as well as additional tips to give students complete guidance in solving the math problem.
Promoting Media Literacy and Bias Detection
Today, looking for information is so easy. Even when you’re not looking for information, they may arrive on your lap on their own. This also leads to more misinformation and biased content. Knowing how to be critical in analyzing sources and information is a crucial skill for students. AI can help students cross-check claims and information against verified sources. If there’s a potential change that information is incorrect, it highlights these sections for students to spot. It can also detect biases in information from articles, social media posts, reports, and more.
Developing Analytical and Logical Thinking
By developing analytical thinking, students learn to break down complex problems into manageable parts to understand their functions and relationships. AI tools can help by giving structured debates in an interactive format. Students get feedback, and they can be graded on how strong their arguments are.
Encouraging Creativity and Innovation
Despite what many believe, AI can also spark creativity. How? By encouraging and supporting students as they brainstorm and assisting them as they refine their work. For instance, in writing, AI may help with grammar mistakes and such so students can focus on expressing their thoughts and feelings freely without worrying too much if their punctuation and spelling are correct. For students in their art or music lessons, AI can help by giving idea prompts to kickstart their visual concepts, melodies, or creative patterns. This can help as well in creating online presentations for students to present in their classes.
Challenges and Concerns
AI is smart—but it’s not perfect. Challenges can arise if people—both teachers and students—entrust everything to AI. Here are some of the common challenges:
Overreliance
The biggest and probably the main concern of people using AI is that people may rely too much on AI, believing everything it says and no longer using their logical thinking. AI-generated answers arrive fast, and students will just accept these answers without questioning and skip their reasoning and analytical process. This “shortcut mentality” is not good for the long term in real-life situations where they will have to use their decision-making skills and judgment. Teach students to use AI as a guide for them to learn and understand the answer, not the instant provider of the final answer.
Lesser Engagement in Deep Learning
When AI generates answers, they do so in summaries, which is an oversimplification of complex ideas and concepts. If students only grasp the surface level of learning, it hinders deep learning, where they can analyze critically and apply these to different contexts. It also makes the retention of information shorter, leading students to quickly forget what they have learned, defeating the purpose of learning. To overcome this, encourage students to still read the full text and even ask them to annotate generated answers and ask them if they agree with it, why or why not, and so on.
Plagiarism and Fairness
With information being easily available, ethical concern about plagiarism and fairness is often raised. Students using AI no longer submit their original work, where they form their own thoughts and opinions. What’s even more challenging here is they don’t conduct their own research anymore. They just use the summarized version provided by AI tools. It’s a challenge as students may no longer develop independent thoughts, and they might miss out on the process of struggling intellectually. As teachers, you must always establish boundaries on when AI can be used or not. For example, students can use AI to check their grammar but not to generate their essays. Using AI detectors may also help as an additional tool to check for AI-generated student submissions.
Conclusion
There are challenges in using AI. But as with many things, when used correctly, it’s a powerful technology to develop critical thinking skills among students. It should be used as a tool to make teaching efficient and guide students in learning—not as a shortcut. Promoting learning literacy needs to continuously and quickly adapt to the changing landscape in modern education, facing modern solutions and challenges.
nandbox App Builder
The capacity of critical thinking is to approach issues objectively and logically, therefore analyzing and evaluating them. Making wise decisions, resolving difficult problems, and creating original answers all depend on it. Encouragement of critical thinking helps companies to better meet demands and increase general production by means of adaptation. Critical thinking becomes a vital component of creating intelligent, user-centric mobile apps when coupled with the nandbox App Builder. By including AI technologies within nandbox, companies can create no-code apps with predictive analytics, data analysis, and automation incorporated in addition to simplifying app development. This helps companies to employ critical thinking in app development and decision-making procedures, therefore providing users with wiser, more effective solutions.
