“Not the Answer” Critical Thinking Activity

Are you looking for a way to teach critical thinking skills to your students? Give my favorite strategy, “Not the Answer” a try! This activity builds critical thinking skills through the use of multiple choice questions. It also allows you a look inside your students’ thinking.

The “Not the Answer” strategy gives students the opportunity to use their critical thinking and verbal skills to explain their thinking to others as well as their persuasive skills in the case of a disagreement. By having students think out loud you are better able to catch misconceptions early on and clear them up.

How to Use the “Not the Answer” Critical Thinking Strategy

This strategy is no prep, and couldn’t be easier to use with very little planning. All you need is a multiple choice question that requires some critical thinking, not something where the answer can be found directly in the question or other text. You can choose to display the question or give each student a copy.

Once you have your question ready:

1. Read the question aloud together, read it to your students, or have your students read it silently to themselves.
2. Give students time to think about the question and each of the answer choices.
3. Ask students to identify which answer could absolutely, positively not be the answer.
   1. Have students share out their response and why before crossing out this answer choice.
4. Ask students to identify the distractor answer. This answer is close to correct but is either missing information, has extra information, or is wrong in another way.
   1. Have students share out their response and why before crossing out this answer choice.
5. Once again ask students to identify the remaining choice that is NOT the answer.
   1. Have students share out their response and why before crossing out this answer choice.
6. By process of elimination, you are left with the correct answer to the question.

If at any time there is a disagreement over the answer being eliminated take the time to talk through students’ thinking and clear up any misconceptions. This is meant to be a teaching strategy, not an assessment, however, it can be used as a tool to show a test-taking strategy.

When to Use the “Not the Answer” Critical Thinking Strategy

This strategy can be used in a variety of teaching situations:

• Whole Class – display the question and go through the steps as a class
• Small Group – in a small teacher-led group go through the steps and discuss each student’s response in depth
• One on one – go through the steps with just you and a student during a tutoring session or when a student is struggling with a particular question
• With partners – list the steps for students to follow and have them discuss with a partner while going through a series of questions

You can, of course, use this strategy in any situation you see fit for your students’ needs!

Modifications for “Not the Answer” Critical Thinking Strategy

This critical thinking strategy is great all on its own, but there are a few modifications you can make to get even more bang for your buck!

One modification would be to incorporate a cooperative learning strategy such as heads together to have students share and discuss their answers to each part of the strategy. This gives the strategy a little bit of a game-like feel to it. The gamification increases student buy-in while encouraging discussion of answers.

Another modification would be to give students cards with A, B, C, and D on them to hold up to share their answers. Similarly, you could also use this strategy while playing a round (or seven) of four corners with each corner marked by an answer choice.

How Do You Plan to Use “Not the Answer?”

There are many ways and times you can build this strategy into your classroom. How will you use it?