Can deliberate practice improve critical thinking skills?

I grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia, so of course I was a fan of Allen Iverson. In addition to being a Hall of Fame player, his response to a reporter’s question about practice was simply iconic:

Now, Iverson wasn’t critiquing practice per se - his response was more about why the reporter was questioning him about his level of practice engagement when he was playing so many minutes during the actual games. I trust Iverson knows the value of practice. And, of course, being someone who teaches about The Art and Science of Expertise, I’m also a fan of (deliberate) practice. And I’m interested in helping people develop better critical thinking skills, so you can bet I was excited when I saw a new article that combines the two.

Motz and colleagues (2023) had the cool idea to develop a critical thinking intervention based in contextualized materials that followed the tenets of deliberate practice and repeated exposure. Basically, they asked people to learn about common logical fallacies in psychology (e.g., correlation does not necessarily imply causation) via induction methods. These methods involves posing scenarios to people and asking them to identify the fallacy, if any existed. They hypothesized that people would “induce” their understanding of the fallacies from repeatedly practicing to identify them. They compared that kind of training to a condition where people learned basic Introduction to Psychology ideas and another control condition. They found that people in the critical thinking induction training condition, compared to those in the other conditions, improved their performance more, from pretest to posttest, on an open-ended psychology critical thinking exam. Thus, the induction method, based in contextualized materials that followed the tenets of deliberate practice and repeated exposure, worked.

So, perhaps critical thinking instruction, which has resulted in mixed findings but shown some promise, would be more effective if it was designed with a deliberate practice, induction approach. Of course, as I’ve written elsewhere, I think the “contextualized materials” part is key. I doubt we can teach “general critical thinking” because I don’t think that exists. What we can teach are dispositions that make it more likely that people will realize when they need to think critically, and then the discipline-specific skills to do so (or, when they lack the skills themselves, the wisdom to seek out others who can think critically for them).