Using GenAI to compose may lead to fewer opportunities for students to think critically during the writing process. One response for instructors is to identify the writing tasks that require the most critical thought and then emphasize those in the curriculum. I designed my own first-year composition curriculum based on this principle of emphasizing critical thinking both within the protected classroom hours and for out-of-class assignments. Yet how do I really know what parts of the process make students think the hardest?
To discern what parts of my revised curriculum led to the most critical thinking, and to better understand what motivates students to think critically, I interviewed three students–I’ll call them Amara, Haniya, and Lucy–from the spring 2025 section of my EH102 class. EH102 is the second course in a two-course sequence of required first-year writing curriculum, and it focuses on research writing. While the students I interviewed did use GenAI during class when I led them through experiments and activities with the tech, each of my interviewees report that they abstained from using it during the research or drafting phase of our major essay.*
For the purposes of the interviews, I told each student that we would define critical thinking as an umbrella term to encompass cognitive activity such as: actively questioning an idea or text, analyzing and/or evaluation information, and putting together existing insights to come to new, reasonable judgments. I emphasized that critical thinking was something that took time and an engaged mind. This small sample of students revealed that they were most engaged in critical thinking during group work, when annotating readings, and while crafting surveys for their primary research.
Group Work:
All three interviewees concluded that working in groups prompted them to engage more in critical thinking than when they worked alone. Haniya explained the most basic way that group work facilitated her critical thinking: it provided sounding boards for making sense of each assignment step-by-step. A sophomore in the pre-nursing track, Haniya had taken my EH101 class during her first semester as a freshman. Unfortunately, she was not able to complete the course but tried again with me later in her academic career and did really well. As a result, she decided to sign up for my 102 course. When I interviewed her about how and when she engaged in critical thinking in my class, she expressed that she has a tendency to “give up” when she feels she doesn’t understand something; however, having a group to work with gave her one way to push through confusion and think collectively about what to do. She admits that for some of the assignments in 102, “my group was confused. We were all confused.” However, she says:
“We would come to class, you would give us insights like ‘try looking here, go here and find this,’ and so we would be texting in the group chat and we would pull up the instructions, think critically, and take in everyone’s input.”
This collective effort, she says, was what helped them go from confusion to activation. Group work, then, might be a basic support that gives students the resilience they need to push their minds into that more difficult place of critical thinking.
The other interviewees emphasized that group work led them to elevate and enhance their own thinking. Lucy, a BLANK major, said that her groupmates would help her take a “half born idea” and then “boost it to the level we wanted.” Whereas she may have stopped short of thinking through an interesting angle while working on her own, the combined efforts of her group allowed her to explore and refine ideas more thoroughly.
Amara, an international student from Nigeria studying psychology, noticed that she had to think more critically to explain her work to fellow groupmates. In one assignment, students had to answer complex questions about a long text and submit a single set of responses as a group. They had time in class to compare responses, discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each, and then finally merge their answers for the final submission. Amara noticed that “people kept asking questions about why [she answered] that way,” and she had to think deeply about how to justify her work. Ultimately, this back and forth conversation brought her to better understand the text.
Required Text Annotations for Homework Readings: Both Haniya and Lucy noticed how the act of annotating readings forced them to think more deeply as they read complex texts for the course. Originally an idea I got from a colleague, Amy Cates, I often require that students submit a PDF of their readings on which they have made a certain number or a certain kind of textual annotations. While there are some specific parameters for what counts as a valid annotation for each assignment, these annotations should represent what students are thinking as they work through reading the text: questions they have, summaries of what they think a passage means, connections between the passage and something they think or wonder, and more.
Haniya cites textual annotation as the strategy that has most revolutionized her ability to understand complex readings. She says:
“Usually, I can’t read books because I can’t read it and understand it in that moment. I’m seeing it, but it doesn’t register in my mind. But I like annotating because it was making me think about what was actually being said….I had to think on that.”
In other words, for someone who might not have experience pushing through complex texts, annotating becomes a helpful strategy to scaffold that process, demonstrating to students that you do not have to understand a text the first time you read it, but that it is normal to need to rephrase it, ask questions, and think more deeply about it. Annotation not only becomes a means of pushing students to read more actively and curiously, but it leads them to becoming more resilient readers.
Lucy notes a different way that annotating contributes to critical thinking: the accumulation of annotations constitutes another body of data to consider when synthesizing all information to come to research conclusions. She said she engaged in the most critical thinking while reading academic studies for her research project in part because of how she annotated the text as she read then used those annotations to make an additional set of notes on a separate document. Finally, she considered both the annotations and the other notes, making connections and drawing conclusions. Her textual annotations formed the basis of an ever-widening pool of information that she needed to incorporate into her larger thinking about the project.
Primary Research Protocols: Finally, two of three interviewees highlighted that when they were crafting surveys aimed at generating data for their project’s research question, their critical thinking was especially supercharged. Writing survey questions is not a linear process; it requires thinking about multiple steps within the context of one overarching goal. Students must consider not only how to phrase the question in a neutral way aimed at soliciting truthful responses from their audiences, but they must also consider how and in what way the question will actually generate information that helps answer the research question. I scaffold this process in class by having each group critique another group’s survey draft, noticing how questions may be biased or misleading and commenting on the alignment of questions and overall research goals. I also give feedback, and the groups consider all input when revising their surveys before they launch.
Amara said that writing survey questions required a ton of critical thinking because, she says:
“I was writing something completely different than what I thought I was writing. I really had to do research about what is a survey question, then I really had to think about where do you want the person answering the question to get to, and how do you lead them there? How do you get into the heads of your survey people…and lead them without suggesting the answer?”
Haniya agreed that the dual process of considering how to neutrally word survey questions while also working to elicit specific information from an audience forced her to engage in critical thinking. Both Haniya and Amara, however, said that it was specifically professor and peer feedback that amped up their critical thinking in the survey-writing process. Instructors, then, should designate time in class for students to practice applying feedback to work they may have been asked to complete outside of class.
What’s Next?
For those who already weave group work, textual annotation, and primary research into your curriculum, look for strategic ways to bring that into protected classroom time as much as possible so that students can think with their brains instead of with GenAI. That might look like offering students in-class time to complete readings and annotations. Perhaps it means releasing your feedback on some assignment right when students get into the classroom and then asking them to meet in groups to address that feedback, requiring that they demonstrate what they’ve changed by the end of the class period.
For those who are less familiar with this kind of work, you can take a look at current curricular resources on this site for supporting group work and incorporating primary research into the composition classroom.
Look forward to Part II of the series where you’ll hear from Amara, Haniya, and Lucy again. I’ll share their explanations about why they chose to take on the cognitive load and invest the time in critical thinking without GenAI for some of the work in my class. Furthermore, I’ll discuss when and for what classes they do choose to use GenAI.
