Deploying Chatbots to Build Students’ Critical Thinking Skills: Leveraging Generative AI Effectively and Purposefully in Higher Education

Critical thinking skills are regarded as a higher-order cognitive ability that can empower students to be more effective at acquiring and applying their hard-earned knowledge. With university education being the penultimate step before students join the working world, also coinciding with when they enter early adulthood, the higher education sector is often tasked with this important mission of inculcating in students critical thinking skills that will serve them well for lifelong learning. The concurrent ascendance of chatbots in a technologically intensifying education landscape has raised questions about whether such conversational AI platforms can be deployed for general instruction, but also for building and enhancing students’ critical thinking skills more specifically. This chapter will first unpack what constitutes critical thinking, before reviewing how chatbots have been and can be leveraged for cultivating university students’ critical thinking abilities. It will discuss the opportunities and pitfalls presented by conversational AI from the perspectives of educators and students before concluding with key takeaways.