What critical thinking involves
Critical thinking is a broad term. In everyday teaching it usually refers to a cluster of habits: asking what a claim is based on, noticing what is missing, weighing alternative explanations and being willing to change one’s mind when the evidence changes. It is not the same as being negative or skeptical about everything.
Open education does not teach these habits automatically. What it can do is create situations where practicing them is easier. This article looks at those situations, offers some classroom ideas and explains why claims about results should be treated with care.
Why open materials may help
Several sources are easier to obtain. When a course relies on a single closed textbook, students have little reason to compare it with anything. If a topic is covered by more than one open text, a teacher can put two explanations side by side. Students can see that authors choose different examples and emphasize different points.
Content can be questioned and changed. Because open materials can often be edited, they are naturally treated as drafts that can be improved. A student who spots an error and proposes a correction is practicing evaluation in a direct way.
Authorship and history can be inspected. Many open resources show who wrote them, when they were revised and what license they use. That information gives learners something concrete to check, and it models the question “where does this come from?”
Context is visible. Differences between versions, such as a local adaptation of a textbook, show that content reflects choices and perspectives.
Classroom activities
The following ideas are examples and can be adjusted to age group and subject.
Compare two explanations. Give students two passages on the same topic from different openly licensed sources. Ask them to list what each includes, what each leaves out and which they found clearer, with reasons.
Find the claim and the support. Choose a short section and ask students to underline each claim and note what evidence, if any, is offered. Do they find that some statements are simply asserted?
Error hunt. Provide a passage with a few deliberate mistakes, written by the teacher for the exercise. Students find and correct them, and explain how they knew.
Check the date. Ask students to find out when a resource was last updated and what may have changed since then, particularly in fast-moving subjects.
Adapt and justify. Students rewrite a paragraph for a different audience and explain what they changed and why.
Read laterally. Teach students to leave a page and check what other sources say about it, a habit known as lateral reading. This is useful for web pages of every kind, not only open ones.
These tasks overlap with wider skills such as information literacy and source evaluation, which are discussed in their own articles. The point here is that open material offers a ready supply of texts that can be examined and adjusted.
Habits students can practice themselves
Independent learners can use a short routine whenever they meet a new resource.
- Who made this, and what is their background or purpose?
- When was it written or updated?
- What evidence is given, and can I check it?
- What does a second source say?
- What would change my mind?
These questions are simple, but applying them regularly is harder than it sounds. Common cognitive biases, such as favoring information that agrees with what we already believe, work against careful evaluation, and it is worth naming them openly.
A necessary caution about evidence
It would be tempting to say that open education improves critical thinking. The honest position is more limited. There is little solid research showing that using open materials, in itself, produces stronger critical thinking. Studies of critical thinking are hard to design, because the skill is difficult to measure and may not transfer easily from one subject to another. Teacher reports are often positive, but they can reflect enthusiasm and may not describe a typical result.
It may also be that the benefit comes from the teaching method rather than the license. A teacher who asks students to compare sources would get similar effects with closed material if enough variety were available. What openness adds is access, flexibility and the possibility of working directly with the text.
Other risks should be recognized. A large pool of free material can include poor-quality or biased content, and learners without guidance may be misled. Students with limited digital literacy may find it hard to assess what they see. Time pressure can push a class back to a single source, whatever the available choice.
Practical advice for teachers
- Pick tasks with a clear thinking goal, such as comparing or questioning, rather than adding activities because they sound modern.
- Model your own evaluation aloud so students see how it is done.
- Keep expectations realistic; improvement is usually gradual.
- Where possible, look at student work over a period rather than in a single test, since habits take time to form.
- Be open to the possibility that some activities do not help, and change them.
Summary of what is reasonable to expect
Open education can provide good conditions for practicing evaluation: more texts, visible authorship and permission to adapt. Whether students actually become better thinkers depends on how those conditions are used. Treating the claim as a hypothesis to test in your own classroom is probably the most sensible stance, and it is in keeping with the very skill being taught.