Can reasoning and decision-making without bias be learned?

Part 1

This first Research Highlight blog aims to begin answering the question “what does teaching critical thinking require in higher education and from whom”? Research by Eva Janssen and Lara van Peppen shows that even a relatively short lesson or course helps students learn, but more is needed to enhance critical thinking.
Their advice is to explicitly address critical thinking in education and involve teachers in this process.

Heated discussions where opinions differ have always existed. However, since the rise  of social media, the threshold for expressing and sharing an opinion seems lower than ever. Opinions or (fake) news can be shared almost unchecked and spread rapidly. It's also easier to find direct confirmation of our gut feelings. Do you think vaccinations are irresponsible, or should they be mandatory? You can quickly find seemingly well-reasoned and extensive arguments for both positions online.

Our current society demands a considered approach to available information, but this is not easy. Due to time constraints and the sheer volume of information at our disposal, we often rely on heuristics (or mental shortcuts) in our thinking. Heuristics help us manage the vast amounts of information we encounter daily and simplify reasoning processes. This enables us to make relatively quick decisions, often without being consciously aware of it.

However, heuristics also make us susceptible to systematic reasoning errors, known as biases[1]. These biases hinder a critical evaluation of information and can lead to reasoning errors with serious consequences, especially in complex professional settings where most higher education graduates end up, such as in medicine, economics, or law. Think of incorrect administration of medicine, providing unsound financial advice, or wrongfully convicting a suspect of a crime.

To avoid reasoning errors, one must suppress their intuitive reaction in certain situations and replace it with a rational response, i.e., think critically. Critical thinking, in short, means [2]"reasoning and reflecting before forming a standpoint or deciding how to act, and being able to explain the basis for that standpoint or decision."

Explicitly incorporating critical thinking in education

We consider it important to educate students to become critically thinking professionals, but we don't quite know how to do that effectively. Lara van Peppen's doctoral research Fostering Critical Thinking: Generative processing strategies to learn to avoid bias in reasoning shows that it's crucial to provide students with instruction on critical thinking and have them practice with domain-relevant problems. This is how students learn. Therefore, embedding critical thinking in higher education curricula and explicitly addressing it in teaching is valuable.

Van Peppen’s research also examines the efficacy of certain practice strategies that stimulate active processing of learning material (so-called 'generative processing strategies') in learning critical thinking skills and applying those skills in new situations. For example, students were encouraged to explain their reasoning process to themselves during practice, also known as 'self-explaining.' However, the study found that generative processing strategies are not a cure-all: while they work well for some skills, they did not provide extra benefits in preventing reasoning errors (beyond the effects of instruction and practice). In short, it's important to have students practice with domain-relevant problems, but how they practice seems less important.

It also became clear how difficult it is to train critical thinking skills so that students can transfer them to new, unpracticed situations. Students often possess the knowledge but struggle to retrieve it fully from memory and apply it in a new context. Thus, it's important to guide students in applying critical thinking skills in new contexts and exposing them to various situations.

We started with the question “what does teaching critical thinking require in higher education and from whom”? and are not quite ready to answer this completely yet. Explicit instruction is needed (from the lecturer) and specific practice situations and tools can help, but how does a lecturer instruct and employ these tools successfully? That’s the subject of the next blog.

 To be continued – in the next Research Highlight more on the crucial role of the teacher.

[1] Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Science, 185,1124–1131. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.185.4157.1124

[2] Critical thinking is a concept with many definitions. For education, it is important to give critical thinking a profession-specific interpretation. Determine what critical thinking means in your field and where you want to place the emphasis. In other words, ensure a training-oriented concretization of critical thinking. A helpful tool for this is the Critical Thinking Toolbox (in Dutch) from Avans University of Applied Sciences.

Author: Lara van Peppen
Fostering Critical Thinking: Generative processing strategies to learn to avoid bias in reasoning

Author: Eva Janssen
Teaching Critical Thinking in Higher Education: Avoiding, Detecting, and Explaining Bias in Reasoning

This blog is written by Eva Janssen and Lara van Peppen. Their doctoral research was part of a larger project funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO; project number: 409-15-203).

In this project, researchers from Utrecht University and Erasmus University Rotterdam closely collaborated with teachers, researchers, and educational advisors from the Brain and Learning department at Avans University of Applied Sciences, part of the Future-Proof Education Expertise Center.