Abstract
Enhancing students’ critical thinking (CT) skills is an essential goal of higher education. This article presents a systematic approach to conceptualizing and measuring CT. CT generally comprises the following mental processes: identifying, evaluating, and analyzing a problem; interpreting information; synthesizing evidence; and reporting a conclusion. We further posit that CT also involves dealing with dilemmas involving ambiguity or conflicts among principles and contradictory information. We argue that performance assessment provides the most realistic—and most credible—approach to measuring CT. From this conceptualization and construct definition, we describe one possible framework for building performance assessments of CT with particular attention to extended performance tasks within the assessment system. The framework is a product of an ongoing, collaborative effort, the International Performance Assessment of Learning (iPAL). The framework comprises four main ingredients: (1) The storyline describes a carefully curated version of a complex, real-world situation. (2) A portfolio of documents in a range of formats, drawn from multiple sources chosen to have specific characteristics. (3) The challenge frames the task to be accomplished. (4) The scoring rubric which comprises a set of scales each linked to a facet of the construct. We discuss a number of use cases, as well as the challenges that arise with the use and valid interpretation of performance assessments. The final section presents elements of the iPAL research program that involve various refinements and extensions of the assessment framework, a number of empirical studies, along with linkages to current work in online reading and information processing.
Highlights
In their mission statements, most colleges declare that a principal goal is to develop students’ higher-order cognitive skills such as critical thinking (CT) and reasoning (e.g., Shavelson, 2010; Hyytinen et al, 2019)
We present a systematic approach to conceptualizing CT
We argue that performance assessments designed in accordance with such an assessment framework provide the most realistic—and most credible— approach to measuring CT
Summary
Most colleges declare that a principal goal is to develop students’ higher-order cognitive skills such as critical thinking (CT) and reasoning (e.g., Shavelson, 2010; Hyytinen et al, 2019). See a short performance assessment of civic online reasoning, requiring response times from 10 to 50 min (Wineburg et al, 2016) Such assessment frameworks could be derived from the omnibus framework by focusing on a reduced number of facets of CT, and specifying the characteristics of the complementary documents to be included – or, perhaps, choices among sets of documents. Shavelson et al (2009) discuss some of the problems arising with non-standardized collections of student work In this context, one advantage of the iPAL framework is that it can provide valuable guidance and an explicit structure for faculty in developing performance tasks for both instruction and formative assessment. Their focus is typically on content coverage rather than other potentially important characteristics, such as the degree of construct representation and the adequacy of their scoring procedures (Braun, 2019)
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