Students’ reasoning when faced with test items of challenging aspects of critical thinking

Abstract

The growing focus on education for critical thinking has increased the need to determine which specific aspects of critical thinking students find challenging. Insight into how students reason when facing problems related to these aspects could improve instruction. While there are several assessments of critical thinking, accounts of reasoning related to these assessments are lacking. Here we present a thematic analysis of 284 secondary students’ written justifications when facing selected challenging items from a modified version of the Cornell Critical Thinking Test Level X. We identified 21 lower-level themes encompassed by six higher-level themes of reasoning. More than a quarter of the responses (28%) expressed strong inductive logic yet were incorrect reasons because the premises used were based on alternative evidence (14%), or because the premises used were made up by students who changed elements of the context (14%). Few responses (3%) did not seem to represent strong inductive logic, most of them being that the students seemed to believe an inference to be just as, or more, believable than an observation. We discuss potential barriers that students faced in this study, and particularly how these barriers relate to skills, dispositions, and knowledge.