Read the full transcript of Steve Pearlman’s talk titled “4 Tips For Developing Critical Thinking Skills” at TEDxCapeMay 2025 conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
STEVE PEARLMAN: Is there anything more important than how well we can think? If you don’t think so, then I’d ask you to think about the fact that you just had to think that. As we look around the world today at the many serious problems that we’re facing, serious problems of war and climate change and untold political strife, as well as the very real problems we face in our personal lives and the problems that our children will face, is there anyone who thinks that this is a problem of too much critical thinking? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller? I don’t think so either.
And that’s why in 2011, I founded the country’s first academic office specifically devoted to the teaching of critical thinking and why I eventually founded the Critical Thinking Institute. I set myself what was a rather humble challenge, a simple ambition, if you will. All I wanted to do was figure out how to teach everybody in the world how to think critically. Yeah, I know, that’s it. I also have other humble ambitions. I like tilting at windmills and someday think the New York Giants might win another Super Bowl. But that was my goal. I wanted to teach everybody how to think critically, from kids through teens to adults, through kindergartens and college classrooms and corporate boardrooms.
What Is Critical Thinking?
So what is this thing that we call critical thinking? Well, this is just a short list of all the things that critical thinking is. Or in fact, this is just half a short list of all the things that critical thinking is. And I’m sure that all of you could make meaningful additions to this list because it goes on and on and on. With that being the case, how in the world can we teach a human being to do all of these different things well?
Well, before we get to that, let’s see, how well are we doing with critical thinking? Well, the Stanford History Education Group did a study of how well teens could think critically while they were online. Their conclusion, and I quote, “young people’s ability to reason about information they see on the internet can be summed up in one word, bleak.” Don’t kill the messenger.
In the Wall Street Journal, upon surveying critical thinking outcomes of college students came to the following rather stark conclusion: “Even at some of the most prestigious flagship universities, test results indicate the average graduate shows little or no improvement in critical thinking over four years.” I know.
And if you want to see just how bad it gets, when researchers had college students wear portable brain monitoring devices for a week, they found, as you would expect, varying degrees of brain activity depending upon what the students were doing, whether they were studying or eating a meal or socializing. But the place they consistently found some of the least brain activity was when students were in class. I’m sure that’s a wonderful statistic for any of you who are currently putting someone through college.
The Sandbox Problem
So I wanted to find out why. Why are our critical thinking outcomes so low? And I cannot begin to enumerate for you all of the problems we found with our critical thinking instruction. It would take far too long. I need a lot of TED Talks to accomplish that. But I can share with you our number one reason. Something that no one had solved for and something that challenged us in what turned out to be a decade-long project. We referred to it as the sandbox problem.
See, even in the simplest of sandboxes where we have children playing, there are an array of complex critical thinking tasks at work. Well, who’s going to get the shovel? How are we going to get this sand out of our shoes? How do we get this other kid to stop throwing sand in everybody’s face? What game should we invent? What should the rules be? And why, again, is it that we’re not allowed to play in the yellow sand? And that’s just the simplest of sandboxes in which we begin, not the metaphoric sandboxes of our lives, sandboxes that obviously become infinitely more complex as we enter adulthood and grapple with the challenges of the real world.
In fact, as we take a look at our list of critical thinking skills and we overlay our sandbox on top of it, we find so many of these already present in the simplest of sandboxes. Well, they’re problem-solving, perhaps about how to move the sand. They’re innovating games and ideas. They’re arguing, perhaps, over who gets the shovel in this case. They’re inquiring about what other kids think they should do and why. And the list could go on and on.
So the sandbox problem for us became as this: Given the complexity of even the simplest sandbox of all of the critical thinking acts that are taking place and even the simplest sandbox among kids, how do we simplify the teaching of critical thinking enough so that everyone in the world can learn it easily without undermining the complexity of critical thinking itself, the complexity that we see in even the simplest of sandboxes?
Well, that challenged us for years. And whatever research we did, we couldn’t find anyone that, to our satisfaction, had solved for this sandbox problem, simplifying the teaching of critical thinking without undermining the complexity of critical thinking.
Back to Basics: How the Brain Evolved to Think
Well, then I had an idea. It occurred to me that if we were ever going to solve the sandbox problem, we would only be able to do so if we relied on how the human brain evolved to think in the first place. Instead of contriving some conception of critical thinking and then trying to get brains to do it, what if, instead, we figured out how the brain was designed to function?
We looked at its most basic operating system and we built a critical thinking system on that.
To figure out how the brain was designed to function, to understand its most basic operating system, the system that’s operating no matter where we are and what we’re doing, the system that is operating as you’re listening to me right now, we had to trace back the origin of how the human brain evolved to think critically. When I say we traced it back, I mean we traced it back pretty far to primordial ooze. This is an actual picture of primordial ooze from billions of years ago, by the way.
So we traced it back to primordial ooze because what evolutionary biologists tell us is that from the moment single-celled organisms came to life in that ooze, they were already capable of four thinking acts. Four thinking acts that are the foundation for all of the more advanced critical thinking that we’re able to do today.
Quoting neuropsychologist Stephen Hughes, those four acts are as follows. They could perceive their environment, sense danger and reward, decide between danger and reward, and act on the decision. In essence, simply put, what’s going on around me? What’s out there that I might want to eat? What’s out there that might want to eat me? How do I weigh some of those pros and cons and how do I ultimately act upon the decision?
You’ve already been through this same process thousands of times already today. You did it when you decided what to have for breakfast. There are an array of choices available to you in your environment that you surveyed. You weighed some pros and cons about different things in terms of their health benefits perhaps or how they tasted and what mood you were in. You made some decisions and put some things on your plate and then you ate your breakfast. You did it hundreds of times if you drove here today, whether or not to change lanes, how fast to go, where to park. And we do it when we make even the most high-stakes decisions in our lives. Well decisions around parenting and our children, career choices and what we do in our careers every single day.
So that is the most basic function that’s operating in our brains all of the time. And the question became, would it be possible to convert that into a system for critical thinking? Would that solve the sandbox problem? Would it simplify critical thinking enough so that everybody could learn it while maintaining the rich complexity that we need critical thinking to be to contend with the rich problems we’re facing in the world?
So here are our four steps. Well it took us a number of years and it took a number of iterations in order to be able to figure out which were the correct overlays that worked for students in learning this to make it easy. We took perceive the environment where the brain is already in an observational mode making an
assessment of everything that’s going on around it. We said, well what if we harness that power and we augment it? So we taught students techniques for detailed analytic observation. Okay, that’s just a fancy way of saying teaching their brains to extract more details from whatever it is they’re observing. Now it doesn’t matter if they’re observing a Shakespeare play, a nursing simulation, a business proposal. What is being observed is not the point. Conditioning the brain to use that step to extract more details from it is the point.
We took the second step and we said if the brain is already in a mode of asking what’s a danger and a reward, what’s a threat and what’s something to value, then why don’t we take that step, harness it, and augment it? So we taught students techniques for complex question clarification.
We took the next step to decide between danger and reward and we said if the brain is already in a reasoning mode making determinations between different things, what if we harness that step and augment it and give students techniques for multivariant evaluation, another fancy way of saying being able to weigh lots of different things against each other at the same time.
And we took the final step to act on a decision. We said well, if the brain is already in a mode of drawing conclusions, let’s harness that capacity and augment it and give students the ability to form complex conclusions, the kinds of conclusions that do justice to the complex situations that we face in our lives.
So we took all of these things and we distilled critical thinking down to just four acts, four primal acts, four acts that your brain does thousands of times a day. You know, have you ever thought about the fact that we teach students math and we teach them how to write and we teach them how to read, but we do not teach students how to think critically? That seems particularly odd, doesn’t it?
The Core Skills of Critical Thinking
Well, let me explain to you why that might be. We know the foundation, the core act of teaching people to read. Well, there’s sight recognition, there’s vocabulary potentially, there’s phonics, there’s things like that. All the things that you learned when you learned to read. And you use all of those same foundations no matter what you read today as adults, whether you read things as a doctor, whether you read poetry, whatever it is you read, you do so because you have mastered those core skills of reading.
Well, we don’t teach people to think critically because perhaps until now we had not identified the core skills of thinking. But what if those four steps that I described to you are in fact those four core steps of thinking?
If we look at our list here, what we discovered was that when we taught students those four steps, all of these other things came along for the ride. Oh, sure, if you’re going to engage in innovation, there are certain additional things that we want your brain to do. But the simple fact of the matter is that you cannot engage in problem solving at all without making a detailed observation of the factors that might matter to the problem, formulating a correct and complex insightful question about that problem, weighing out different pieces of information as they may relate and impact your conclusion to that problem and ultimately drawing a complex conclusion.
Nor can you engage in strategizing, nor can you engage in innovating, nor can you do any other of the critical thinking acts that we mentioned, nor any of the critical thinking acts that you might be thinking of right now. They all depend first and foremost on that primal skill of critical thinking that we taught students how to do better, something that anyone can learn.
The Results of Teaching Critical Thinking
Well, how did it work out? We had first and second undergraduate students, undergraduates, who after just one course wrote papers that when we presented them to colleagues at other universities were typically rated as graduate-level work.
Just a two-week intervention at a high school in Harlem, New York, not only saw wonderful increased gains in critical thinking but something that we didn’t even teach the students. Increased complexity in their sentence structures.
Class discussions became richer and more invigorated with students often being the ones to take the lead, students who respected one another’s ideas more whether or not they disagreed, sometimes especially if they disagreed, because regardless of what we thought, we all know that we could respect one another’s reasoning process, something that might be important in the world today.
And it only worked in every discipline in which we tried it. As noted by faculty in those disciplines and faculty across the discipline who said they never seen such complex critical thinking in their lives. But it also worked outside of class.
I can’t tell you the number of comments in person and in course evaluations that we received from students who talked about how this affected how they made decisions in their lives. And I got this one note slipped under my door at the end of a semester, which said, “It helped me deal with my personal issues in my relationships because it gave me a new way to think through things like never before. This has changed how I think forever. This is one of the few classes I had that isn’t just about school.” What’s better than that?
So we solved the sandbox problem because we built critical thinking on a way that’s natural, that leverages our natural, most basic, most instinctive brain function and turned it into an intellectual set of skills. We made it something that everyone in the world can learn regardless of their age, regardless of what you do, regardless of whether or not you get a fancy education. We found a way to teach critical thinking that was at once easy to learn, yet not only didn’t undermine the complexity of critical thinking, it augmented it.
The Importance of Critical Thinking
Listen, researchers tell us this. The single biggest determinant for the decisions our kids make in their lives, high-stakes decisions with respect to drug use, peer pressure, career choice, is not their raw intellect. It’s not how smart they are. It’s their critical thinking skills.
And a recent survey of 1,000 employers said that the number one skill they are seeking, but do not find enough of, in employees is critical thinking.
Well, we figured out how to teach critical thinking. We figured out how to teach everybody. We can teach it in elementary school classrooms, corporate boardrooms, and everywhere in between. And given the problems facing the world today, I think we could use a little more critical thinking. What do you think?
