Select a choice

Critical Thinking and 21st Century Competencies in Education by Dr Turner Lam

Jul 2025

Importance of Critical Thinking

Why is critical thinking important for students?

As the world embraces AI, many answers can be found through ChatGPT or its equivalent chatbots. This indicates that content is readily available on the Internet. With this large amount of information present, critical thinking is needed to assist students in making informed decisions.

How does critical thinking help students beyond the classroom?

Critical thinking is a crucial part of problem solving. As we prepare students to be world-class ready workers, students need this skill to empower them in navigating through different environments and conditions to arrive at a best solution.

What are some stumbling blocks that could prevent students from utilising critical thinking skills?

One important factor of critical thinking is allowing students to approach a problem from multiple perspectives. In many Asian contexts, however, students are often conditioned to search for a model answer. In contrast, the definitive answers seldom exist in the real world. Critical thinking involves making the best possible decision based on the information and knowledge available. Each choices has its pros and cons. Critical thinking involves weighing your options and determining which outcome provides the most benefits to you.

A Teacher’s Role

Apart from Critical Thinking, name 3 other 21st Century Competencies skills you think that students must have to be future ready?

In the 21st century, as the world becomes a village, the Collaborative Problem Solving (CPS) framework states that collaboration, communication and digital readiness plays an integral part in shaping critical thinking.

ARTICLE YOU MIGHT LIKE:
Three Tips for A Successful Online Collaborative Learning Experience

How do you see the role of the teacher evolving in developing future-ready skills?

To meet the challenging goals of education, there needs to be an alignment between Instruction, Learning, and Assessment- The Constructive Alignment framework (Biggs, 1996). Teachers must move beyond traditional, content-heavy teaching models and adopt instructional approaches that focuses on competency and learning development and meaningful learning.

In terms of Learning approach, students should practice reflective and active knowledge construction, rather than memorization.

An area of transformation could start from assessment. Modern day assessment procedure should be reimaged to be more performance based, interpretative and contextualized. This enables students to demonstrate their learning and critical thinking skills based on the real-world contexts that involves complexity and nuance.

Considerations for Teachers

What techniques would you recommend teachers use to guide their students to think critically, be it in an assignment or providing an opinion.

Constructivism and Inquiry are good techniques to empower teachers in guiding students to think critically. For example, showing students a photo of Leonardo da Vinci-many may not get them to recognise him or they may be unsure. But if we show them a picture of the Mona Lisa and ask who painted it; most will say Leonardo da Vinci. This illustrates constructivism in action. Many learners possess relevant knowledge, but the connections between ideas may be weak. Constructivism involves using activities to help learns build on their prior knowledge and strengthen those connections. In addition, instructions must accompany assessment methods. This implies that credit should be given to students who can provide alternative yet logical answers, as this reflects deeper critical thinking and understanding.

How do you adapt your approach to evoke critical thinking for students at different levels of readiness or motivation?

To help teachers integrate critical thinking into their classrooms, my research of DDMTS Methodology Model provides teachers with a scaffold into their instruction and assessment processes. This methodology provides teachers with a clear indication into how critical thinking is defined and provide teachers with an expectation of critical thinking at different ages.

What are some factors that may impact the progress of introducing critical thinking skills through classroom activities?

I believe standardised testing may not provide the most effective avenue to foster critical thinking as students are trained to solve questions with a model answer approach. While standardised testing is very efficient in checking the content acquisition ability of students, there is a need to rethink how we can capitalise on content acquisition ability to demonstrate content application.

Many teachers use Problem-Based Learning (PBL) as an alternative approach to promote deeper thinking and problem solving. However, a common challenge is that some teachers still expect a model answer in PBL tasks, which undermines the original intent of the approach.

Catch Up on MCE’s Latest Podcast – Watch It Now