Shaping Critical Thinking Skills and Institutional Readiness: The Role of Generative Artificial Intelligence in Bangladesh’s Higher Education

The integration of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) into Higher Education (HE) is quickly transforming teaching and learning, inducing crucial concern among faculty members and university administrators about its influence on indispensable cognitive skills such as Critical Thinking (CT). Despite this rapid transformation and growing presence of GenAI in HE, limited research addresses how its usage influences students’ Critical Thinking skills (CTS) and how faculty members and administrators adapt to this transformative shift. This limit is even more pronounced in the context of the Global South, where universities are also affected by GenAI transformative shift. Therefore, this study investigates of the impact of using GenAI on students’ CTS through short term experiment, as well as exploring faculty members and administrators’ perspectives on GenAI and students’ CTS through interviews. This mixed methods research was conducted at the National University, Bangladesh (NUB), which represents 70% of HE students in the country. From quantitative strand, based on the Constructivist Learning Theory (CLT) and Cognitive Offloading Theory (COT), this study employed a Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) on 108 undergraduate students dividing into two equal groups: an experiment group (n=54; GenAI Assistance) and control group (n=54; Traditional Approach). The findings of this short-term experiment revealed a statistically significant improvement in CTS among students in the GenAI-assisted group in comparison with control group. In the qualitative strand, semi-structured interviews were conducted with seven faculty members and seven academic administrators. By employing Braun and Clarke (2006) sixphase framework, qualitative data were analysed by thematic and thematic clustering. The findings revealed that five major themes with four crucial thematic clusters had emerged with both faculty members and administrator’s perspectives. Together, the quantitative and qualitative findings of this study show that the impact of GenAI on students’ CT is shaped not only by how the tools are used, but also by the presence of thoughtful guidance and contextual support from faculty and institutions. This study contributes to theory and practice by highlighting the need for ethical, localized integration of GenAI to accelerate CTS in HE. It recommends decentralized governance, enhanced faculty training and reformed assessment towards GenAI’s role in shaping CT in massified and resource-constrained higher educational context.