In the era of AI, avoiding cognitive offloading can involve effective prompts to get better responses from chatbots and classroom practices to strengthen critical thinking such as peer tutoring, Socratic discussions, live journaling and teaching critical thinking, according to a Chalkbeat article.
But critical thinking is directly connected to the content in math, history, and science classes, and focusing on abstract critical thinking skills that are disconnected from content risks de-emphasizing fluency with a broad set of facts — essential for critical thinking.
“Domain knowledge is a crucial driver of thinking skill,” wrote University of Virginia cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham in 2020 for the American Educator, a publication of the American Federation of Teachers. “Critical thinking for open-ended problems is enabled by extensive stores of knowledge.”
As technology makes knowledge more accessible, some say schools should place less emphasis on basic facts that are easy to look up. “Education in the 21st century must go beyond imparting knowledge,” says the World Economic Forum. Schools must impart “future-ready skills” like critical thinking and creativity.
A panel of academics at the National Research Council more than a decade ago considered how schools could develop “deeper learning” and “21st century skills.” The experts viewed 21st century skills as dimensions of expertise specific to — and intertwined with — knowledge within a particular domain.
To be sure, there are some skills — communication, personal organization, teamwork — that are useful in many settings and subjects. And decontextualized facts — say, memorizing the presidents without a sense of their place in history — aren’t sufficient for critical thinking.
To think critically, students need to seamlessly access and synthesize a large number of basic facts. To solve math problems, students must know their times tables. To infer the causes of historical events, they need familiarity with dates and historical figures. To read and analyze complex texts, they need a wide vocabulary.
When students use external sources too frequently for missing information, the brain struggles to keep track of all the new facts at once. AI can help find new information, but knowledge is still necessary to prompt AI appropriately, to assess the accuracy of its output, and to apply it to specific tasks.
If teachers are not taught explicitly about the connection between knowledge and critical thinking, some may have the impression that factual content matters less than it used to.
Jessie Roeder, a high school robotics and computer science teacher in New York City, appreciates the AFT’s effort to help members navigate the complexities of using AI. He’s already attended four trainings put on by the National Academy for AI Instruction, a multimillion-dollar initiative launched by the American Federation of Teachers and backed by AI companies Anthropic, Microsoft, and OpenAI. During the critical thinking session, he raised the importance of knowledge for using AI effectively.
“You have to know enough to be able to say, wait a second, this is BS,” he says.
Chalkbeat
