Gamifying the development of critical thinking in education

Critical thinking is an essential skill for students to develop to not only succeed in further education, but also to succeed in their professional lives. Critical thinking is a must-have to get ahead in most lines of work, and demonstrating critical thought is often a requisite of being accepted onto graduate programmes.

But how do you teach critical thinking? It’s not a mathematical formula a student can learn and practice, it’s not a historical timeline they can memorise, nor a biological structure they can understand the inner workings of. It’s essentially a cognitive operating system. To teach critical thinking is to upgrade a student’s approach to decision making and processing information, and one of the most effective methods for teaching critical thinking skills, both as a form of instruction and as a form of practice, is through gamification and game based learning (GBL).

Defining critical thinking

As a term, critical thinking gets thrown around a lot. Organisations are always looking for critical thinkers to help take their business into the world of tomorrow, academics preach the importance of students demonstrating critical thought and utilising their deductive reasoning, but when we break it down to its simplest terms, what are they actually saying?

In short, critical thinking is asking questions and forming judgements based on an unbiased analysis of available evidence. To practise critical thinking is to approach a problem, ask the right questions, seek out the best available evidence, consider and debate alternate points of view, and make a recommendation. Critical thinking skills are necessary when pursuing any academic discipline. At university, essays typically pose a question and ask students to sift through and synthesise all available information in order to come to a conclusion. In the real world, the process of critical thinking is applied at scale to send rockets into space, harness the energy that powers our homes, and cultivate the produce that feeds us.

Any leader in any industry is required to think critically in their daily lives. Hotel managers organising events will think critically to execute them without disrupting guests. Restaurateurs will use critical thinking skills when managing supplier relationships and planning for seasonal levels of trade. Fashion brands will employ critical thinking skills when it comes to putting together clothing ranges, looking at sales data and feedback from retailers to ensure they have a successful season. Every organisation, to succeed and to survive, is asking questions which require critical thinkers to appropriately answer. 

Tomorrow’s innovators and entrepreneurs

If you’re teaching secondary or high school-age children, or even primary or elementary school-age children, it’s never too early to start developing their abilities as critical thinkers through educational games. They’re going to need it, so why not start them young and get them in the habit?

The problem is, it can appear to be counter-productive to be teaching subjects in specific ways to help your students pass their exams, and to simultaneously develop their analytical reasoning skills. They’re being lectured to and reading books to learn about the Ancient Egyptians, but those same methods aren’t necessarily going to work while teaching critical thinking skills. Everyone who’s ever entered into a debate with a fiercely opposing point of view knows that you can’t tell someone else how to think.

Gamification as a vehicle to encourage critical thinking

Gamification is an ideal tool to bring critical thinking skills into the classroom for students of all ages. Learning to employ critical thinking is an interactive and dynamic process. It involves asking questions, responding to challenges, and assessing evidence in order to make decisions. If you remove all the stakes from critical thinking, it is a game. In fact, the concept of debating societies in universities and as an extracurricular activity in some schools offers exactly this concept – taking a subject, assigning points of view, and encouraging students to use their reasoning skills to make a sound and rational argument in order to “win.”

Gamification allows you to access certain psychological engagement levers to engage your students in critical thinking. The nature of critical thinking in a game involves a social dimension that involves the sharing and discussion of opposing points of view, appeals to curious players who enjoy learning more about topics, and can tap into a player’s hunger for challenge – critical thinking exercises the brain, and requires intellectual effort to engage in at any level.

Encourage students to think outside the box

A huge component of critical thinking involves asking the right questions to get productive responses. In some games or scenarios, the right questions might need to elicit a “Yes” or a “No” answer. In other cases, a more productive response might offer more description, potentially illustrating the rationale for or against a particular point of view.

Questions, and devising appropriate questions for critical thinking tasks, are easily incorporated into gamified teaching. For example, taking the Quiz format from the Drimify platform, you can customise the quiz to not only take multiple choice answers, but also open answers, potentially inviting students to enter their own questions. The manners in which this could be utilised to develop critical thinking skills are varied, and can be easily tailored to different age and ability levels, from those designed for younger students, to educational games for adults who are retraining.

Empower students to ask the right questions

At a more junior level, the question could just take the form of a real world problem an organisation needs to solve, and multiple choice answers would take the forms of possible questions that could be asked in order to get more information that would be required to provide a solution. The aim of the game would be to select the best question. As critical thinking is a subjective process, instead of using a multiple choice Quiz with a definitive “right answer,” you could use the Survey format and have all answers possess some merit, using the results to foster discussion and debate.

This Quiz format could be made more complex by using open questions instead of multiple choice, and encourage students to phrase articulate, open-ended questions that pinpoint gaps in the information they have. You could even use this format to ask for students to explain why they think their question works, encouraging them to critically assess their own process.

In a classroom context, you would be able to collect answers instantly, then use the student suggested questions to generate discussion among your class about which ones are the most appropriate and why. The online educational games you can create through Drimify are accessible on any modern device through either a link or a QR code. This means every student can participate and put in an original contribution, as opposed to the classic hands-up method that will favour the more outgoing students.

Build your critical thinking learning games into multi-level learning pathways

Critical thinking is a cognitive operating system, and to engage your students in practising critical thinking is to install an upgrade. You could look to the Dynamic Path™ format to create a more immersive, multi-level interactive learning experience for your students, where the quizzes could get more complex as they go on. Some of the modules could take the form of pure content, be that video or text, with which you could illustrate examples of critical thinking from the real world, and base subsequent levels around those problems.

Easily build learning experiences to encourage your students to think critically

Utilising a Dynamic Path™ format as a multi-level learning experience will allow you to encourage your students to practise in all aspects of critical thinking: asking appropriate questions, analysing how useful evidence is based on source validity, and drawing conclusions. Tailoring each level to different aspects can help break down the process of critical thinking, and help prepare your students for their future studies and careers.

Don’t hesitate to get in touch with our team of gamification experts to discuss your education project. Well-planned critical thinking exercises work naturally in a gamified context, as students participate in the game, much like they are required to participate when practising critical thinking. It’s an active process, so your students will benefit from an active medium.

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