Abstract
Although the development of critical thinking (CT) is a major goal of science education, adequate emphasis has not been given to the measurement of CT skills in specific science domains such as physics. Recognizing that adequately assessing CT implies the assessment of both domain-specific and domain-general CT skills, this study reports on the development and validation of a test designed to measure students’ acquisition of CT skills in electricity and magnetism (CTEM). The CTEM items were designed to mirror the structural components of items identified in an existing standardized domain-general CT test, and targeted content from an introductory Electricity and Magnetism (E&M) course. A preliminary version of the CTEM test was initially piloted on three groups of samples: interviews with physics experts (N = 3), student cognitive interviews (N = 6), and small-scale paper and pencil administration (N = 19). Modifications were made afterwards and the test was administered to a different group of second-year students whose major was mechanical engineering (N = 45). The results showed that the internal consistency (Cronbach’s α = .72) and inter-rater reliability (Cohen’s kappa = .83) of the CTEM test are acceptable. The findings overall suggest that the CTEM test can be used to measure the acquisition of domain-specific CT skills in E&M, and a good basis for future empirical research that focuses on the integration of CT skills within specific subject matter instruction. A broader CT assessment framework is proposed and possible research questions that can be addressed through the CTEM test are discussed.
Highlights
The development of critical thinking (CT) is a major goal of science education, adequate emphasis has not been given to the measurement of CT skills in specific science domains such as physics
The accompanying expectation has been that embedding CT skills within a subject matter instruction in various specific domains will facilitate the acquisition of CT skills that are applicable to a wide variety of thinking tasks within the domain in question and that it will facilitate their transfer to other problems in everyday life (Adey & Shayer, 1994; Lawson, 2004)
We purposely selected Electricity and Magnetism (E&M) as it is a fundamental course for physics and other science majors, and an introductory course was selected as we focus on student CT development starting from the first-year of enrollment in university
Summary
The development of critical thinking (CT) is a major goal of science education, adequate emphasis has not been given to the measurement of CT skills in specific science domains such as physics. Halpern (2014) defines CT as the use of thinking strategies that increase the probability of a desirable outcome Together with her definition, Halpern identified five major categories of CT skills that she argues as relevant for a desirable outcome in any domain: reasoning, hypothesis testing, argument analysis, likelihood and uncertainty analysis, and decision-making and problem-solving (Halpern, 2010, 2014). Much of the CT literature associates CT with certain mental processes (such as reasoning, analyzing, predicting, etc.), which can be improved through instruction, and measured by using domain-general thinking tasks that do not require specific subject matter expertise. The above-mentioned CCTT and HCTA tests do not aim to measure students’ ability to think critically on specific subject matter domains, rather they use content from a variety of daily life situations that test takers at a college level are assumed to already be familiar
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