Reframing Indian Education: Digital Learning and Critical Thinking Post-NCF 2023

This paper analyses how the National Curriculum Framework for School Education (NCF 2023) reconceptualises digital learning towards the promotion of critical thinking in Indian classrooms. The rapid proliferation and penetration of digital platforms like DIKSHA, PM eVIDYA in the era of COVID-19 led to their expanded accessibility but also brought to sharp focus issues of equity, quality and privacy. Inspired by NEP 2020, NCF 2023 aims to take teaching mode from mere access. This paper systematically reviews policy documents, platform statistics, UNESCO and government reports, as well as recent research in order to (1) add to the emerging perspective on digital teaching of NCF 2023 (2) evaluate the best practices and likely pitfalls that existing high tech tools afford for practicing critical thinking within technology-based assessment paradigms for Nigerian classroom context and (3) suggest classroom interventions so as to have teacher development highlighted with use of technology for CT. The results suggest that the national platforms (in particular: their reach and teacher coach training) contains rich content, but that there are still digital divides and varying quality of educational resources – along with weak formative assessment practice – acting as bottlenecks to further reasoning/inquiry breakthroughs. the paper suggests for curriculum development, changes to assessment, adaptive digital resources and long-term teacher support that can harness the power of digital tools to make inquiry-based reasoning through evidence-based reasoning and metacognition shapes how they work rather than simply being a mere transmitter of factual information.