Designing and implementing a test for measuring critical thinking in primary school

Abstract

The importance of critical thinking in education is underpinned by decades of theoretical and practical work. Differences have been demonstrated between students who receive education in this area from an early age and those who do not. However, not enough work has been done to measure these skills in a classroom setting. Given that the best time to teach critical thinking is during the first years of primary education, we designed a test to determine the level of critical thinking among 3rd and 4th grade students in Language Arts using a graphic novel. We showed the legitimacy of the instrument through Construct Validity, Content Validity, Pearson product-moment correlation, Reliability and Item Analysis. Using the instrument, we studied how critical thinking skills differ among 3rd grade students, according to their socioeconomic status (SES), studying schools with low, middle and high SES. We found significant differences between the schools, which suggest that there may be a relationship between socioeconomic status and the development of critical thinking skills. The test presented in this study is an improvement on existing assessment tools as it replaces unidimensional models with models that provide a more detailed and multidimensional picture of student learning.