Earlier this year, education researcher Lixiang Yan realized that students could outsource all of their work for his university course to artificial intelligence. In praise of human teachers: universities must resist outsourcing everything to AI Yan, 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, “without the learner being intellectually engaged” at all, Yan says.
The experience made Yan think that teaching students to reason and think for themselves “is more critical than ever”, he says. 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.
Cognitive processing is typically effortful, and that’s what AI effectively removes,” says cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. 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. Ask five people to define critical thinking, and you’ll get five different replies. (I tried.) “Critical thinking is sort of the pinnacle” of human cognition, says Willingham.
Early results are in — and they’re not good One reason for the varied definitions is that the term is used widely in education and everyday discourse, but less by researchers who study cognition. Instead, 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 showed1.
Concerns 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.
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