How do I help kids develop critical thinking skills?

Structured, intentional adult-child interaction is the most consistently supported driver of critical thinking development in children. Teacher instructional interactions in early classroom settings predict academic and language skill gains, indicating that deliberate cognitive scaffolding matters more than environment quality alone. Parent scaffolding behaviors, particularly cognitive support and autonomy support from fathers and emotional support from mothers, predict children's initiative-taking, metacognition, and persistence during problem-solving tasks. STEM activities applied consistently over weeks produce measurable improvements in problem-solving skills in preschool-age children. Sustained shared thinking, a pedagogical approach in which adults and children collaboratively build ideas, is identified as a high-quality practice linked to better child outcomes.

Contested

Research is largely consistent

What This Means

Several concrete strategies are supported by the evidence. First, ask open-ended questions during everyday problem-solving: the elicitor style, in which parents ask frequent questions rather than provide answers, predicts gains in children's attention and impulse control through kindergarten. Second, resist the impulse to step in immediately. Cognitive and autonomy support, meaning letting children take the lead and supporting their own reasoning rather than directing it, is a significant predictor of children's initiative and metacognition across multiple activity types. Third, build in hands-on, problem-focused activities: an eight-week STEM program with three sessions per week improved problem-solving scores in six-year-olds relative to controls. Fourth, think of conversation itself as practice. Family discussions about past experiences, especially difficult ones, build the self-regulation and attentional skills that underpin critical thinking. Fifth, favor an authoritative approach over high-control parenting: overcontrolling and autonomy-restricting patterns are linked to lower initiative and reasoning development across multiple studies.

Receipts

• Measures of Classroom Quality in Prekindergarten and Children’s Development of Academic, Language, and Social Skills (2008)
  Cited 1,840 times

  In a study of 2,439 children across 671 pre-K classrooms, teachers' instructional interactions, not just the physical environment or program standards, predicted academic and language skill gains, making the case that deliberate cognitive engagement drives development.

• Chinese Parents’ Scaffolding and Children’s Initiative in Mother–Child and Father–Child Interactions across Different Types of Problem-solving Activities (2020)
  Cited 34 times

  Across worksheet, game, and application tasks with 96 Chinese parent-child pairs, fathers' cognitive and autonomy support consistently predicted children's self-starting, metacognition, and persistence; the type of support mattered as much as whether support was given.

• The effects of STEM activities on the problem-solving skills of 6-year-old preschool children (2021)
  Cited 32 times

  An eight-week STEM intervention with six-year-olds produced statistically significant improvements in problem-solving scale scores compared to a control group following the standard curriculum only, providing direct experimental evidence for structured activity-based approaches.

• Assessing quality in early childhood education and care: sustained shared thinking and emotional well-being (SSTEW) scale for 2–5-year-olds provision (2015)
  Cited 77 times

  The SSTEW scale operationalizes sustained shared thinking as a measurable, high-quality pedagogical strategy: adults and children build understanding together rather than adults transmitting answers, which is directly applicable to home and classroom practice.

• Chilean Family Reminiscing About Emotions and Its Relation to Children’s Self-Regulation Skills (2015)
  Cited 50 times

  Parents who used an elicitor style during conversations about past negative experiences, meaning they asked many questions rather than narrating the story themselves, predicted greater gains in children's attention and impulse control by end of kindergarten in a sample of 210 low-income Chilean dyads.