After the first few months scrambling to switch everything online, I have spent more time reading and exploring the SoTL literature. I suppose that’s one good thing about this online teaching thing? One thing that I read recently is that there are actually standardized tests that assess student critical thinking skills, and I think I am going to use them for quality control next term.
Donal Hatcher’s “Which Test? Whose Scores? Comparing Standardized Critical Thinking Tests” (2011) described a few standardized tests used at university level to assess students’ critical thinking skills, such as the Ennis-Weir Critical Thinking Essay Test, the California Critical Thinking Skills Test, and the Cornell Critical Thinking Test Level Z. And there are researchers in the Critical Thinking literature arguing for their use. (He and his department did a 18-year study on the use of these three tests, and the paper is about this test. It’s worth a read!)
I was initially a bit sceptical about such tests. First, how can critical thinking skills be quantified? Are such tests simply another part of the misguided drive towards making education achievements measurable? Second, a standardized test may be able to assess a student’s critical thinking skills, but it cannot assess their disposition to think critically. To the extent that we want our students to have both skills and disposition, such tests will fall short.
My thoughts are the following. For the second point, it is never easy to assess students’ dispositions/traits. It will at least require a well-designed longitudinal study. But not being able to assess dispositions in one study shouldn’t stop us from assessing skills. Doing only the latter would still be worthwhile.
For the first point, as someone with plenty of first-hand experience of standardized tests (or “public exams”, as we call them), I remain to be convinced of the effectiveness of such tests. I need to dig deeper into the literature to know to what extent critical thinking skills can indeed be assessed by a test and how well the tests mentioned above can do that. But I think that these tests can be useful for quality control—that is, they can give me an idea how much my students have learnt from the course. In particular, the Cornell test includes questions of evaluating deductive arguments, statistical arguments, and relevancy. These are all topics that I teach in my Critical Thinking.
I am going to experiment with it next term. I will do a simple pre-test/post-test experiment, asking my students to take the test at the beginning and at the end of the term. Students will get 2% by completing each test. Let’s see if this works!
