Ideas

IDEA #15: Assessing Critical Thinking

“Professors who teach [critical] thinking skills such as arguing, analyzing, synthesizing, drawing conclusions, solving problems, making decisions, and evaluating need to know how well their students can use these skills.”⁵

Overview

Effective assessment begins with writing clear learning outcomes that outline the observable, measureable skills you want your students to develop. Once you have identified the objectives, you can design assessment activities to measure those skills.

Considerations

• Align Assessment & Activities: Be sure that graded assignments and test questions are similar to practice problems and learning activities, and provide formative assessment of students' progress on practice exercises so students can improve before they are graded. ¹
• Grade the Process: Cognitive risk-taking is a prerequisite to successful critical thinking, but when students are worried about their grade, they can be risk averse. Help make the risks manageable for students by grading the process as well as (or instead of) the product, evaluating how the student approached the assignment, not just the final result.
• Make Criteria Clear: "Even though many of us may be able to identify critical thinking when we see it, explicitly stated criteria help both students and teachers know the goal toward which they are working."⁶ Providing rubrics with specific descriptions of how to demonstrate effective critical thinking not only clarifies expectations for students, it makes grading more efficient. The Critical Thinking Toolkit in the Teaching Handbook has many examples of rubrics for a variety of courses and assignment types.^1,4,5 See: https://www.wwu.edu/teachinghandbook/student_engagement/critical_thinking_toolkit.shtml
• Spread it Out: Rather than assessing all the outcomes in one culminating project at the end of the quarter, give students the opportunity to demonstrate mastery of just a few critical thinking skills or outcomes at a time in a series of smaller assignments throughout the course.
• Focus on Evidence: Help your students develop their critical metacognition by talking about assignments as evidence of their mastery (or not) of course content. Ask them, "What specifically does your writing make evident to me about your progress?"³
• Use Audits: The Critical Thinking Audits in Idea #4 can work well as either formative or summative assessments of students' progress in critical thinking.
• Student Self-Assessment: "Each step in the process of thinking critically is tied to a self-reflexive step of self-assessment...Because of the importance of self-assessment to critical thinking, it is important to bring it into the structural design of the course."⁴
• Grade Profiles: Provide students very clear expectations for what each level of work looks like in the class so they aren't expecting A grades for C-level work. This example might help you articulate grade profiles.²

References