Critical Information Processing: Promoting 21st Century Thinking Skills in Children

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In modern information societies, the ability to understand and critically evaluate complex information is important for educational and professional success, personal development, and social and political participation. While the training of individual critical thinking skills has been attempted with some success with adults, it remains unclear whether training programs can teach generalizable thinking skills to children. This is problematic, as children are exposed to a wide range of incomplete and misleading information, easily accessible through social media, and are therefore clearly in need of critical thinking skills. It is also an open question whether individual critical thinking skills are complementary facets of a comprehensive model of critical information processing, which unfold their beneficial effects in combination. This project will address these research gaps by developing and testing a comprehensive model of Critical Information Processing (CIP) for children, and testing the effectiveness of a CIP-training program for secondary school children. Based on previous research, the main components of CIP include the capacity to 1) identify elements of simple arguments such as their claim, reason, and warrants, 2) evaluate the structural quality of arguments, 3) attend to source characteristics for assessing the credibility of information, and 4) control belief-biases in the comprehension and evaluation of information. The first aim of this research program is to develop and test a model of CIP, based on theories of rational thinking and dual-process models, and operationalized in the understanding and evaluation of informal arguments embedded in ecologically valid debates and media. We will test the predictions on central cognitive characteristics of the four components of CIP and their interrelations. The second aim is to evaluate whether children benefit from a 5-week training of their critical thinking skills in a school-based setting and whether critical thinking skills transfer to new content and tasks. To date, there are no comprehensive studies of the effects of training critical thinking skills in children and the relationships of CIP and children’s general cognitive capacities, reading comprehension, executive functions, and academic achievement. We will therefore test whether a school-based randomized trial intervention can a) increase children’s critical thinking skills on trained topics, b) transfer to a wider range of topics (near transfer), c) transfer to new tasks and general academic performance (far transfer), and d) be maintained after training.