Development of an Ai-Powered Tool for Enhancing Critical Thinking in Secondary Education: a Case Study

Abstract

The development of critical thinking skills has become a central priority in contemporary education, especially in preparing students for complex problem-solving, informed decision-making, and lifelong learning. This paper presents the design and initial deployment of a bilingual (Kazakh-Russian) AI-powered educational tool aimed at fostering critical thinking among secondary school students. The application leverages NLP and large-language models to analyze literary or instructional texts and generate Bloom-aligned questions at all cognitive levels, from basic recall to analysis, evaluation, and creative synthesis. The system enables teachers to upload text-based content, upon which the AI automatically produces structured level-specific questions tailored to the material. An integrated scoring and feedback mechanism supports formative assessment and encourages self-regulated learning. The preliminary evaluation includes an expert review of 30 generated items (three teachers of the literature) and early engagement metrics from a pilot with Class 6A ($\mathrm{n}=18$). Baseline data collection is underway to allow a comparative analysis of the impact of the tool on the development of critical thinking. This case study illustrates the potential of AI to deliver personalized and cognitively engaging learning experiences in formal education. The paper details the system architecture, instructional logic (including retrieval-augmented, prompt-driven generation), and pilot evaluation framework, providing a foundation for future empirical studies and scalable implementation in diverse educational contexts.

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