Teaching Critical Thinking in Psychology: A Handbook of Best Practices

Report 9

An Introductory Exercise for Promoting

Critical Thinking About Psychological

Measurement

Jeffrey D. Holmes

Any collection of strategies for teaching critical thinking about psychology should include

material addressing psychological testing issues. Measurement topics are particularly

important because students are likely to have exaggerated confidence in the validity of test

feedback (Beins, 1993). The Internet provides access to an endless collection of psychological

measures, but the lack of quality control (Connor-Greene & Greene, 2002) means that

cyberspace provides a forum for dissemination of scales and feedback with little or no validity

evidence. Surveys of my introductory psychology lab classes revealed that the vast majority

of students had completed free access psychological tests online or in magazines and that

more than three-quarters of these students believed the results were accurate. Lacking experi-

ence with scale construction methods, students may be ill equipped to differentiate well-

designed and validated scales from those of dubious quality. This short report presents a

manageable exercise to promote critical thinking through greater understanding of complex

measurement issues including reliability, validity, statistical error, and construct definition.

Inspired by earlier work on teaching scale construction (Benjamin, 1983), I developed

this exercise for a large introductory lab course consisting of 7–10 smaller subsections. The

activities, however, are relevant to an array of courses such as research methods, testing, and

personality, where instructors can divide large classes into appropriately sized smaller groups.

The exercise requires students to construct their own personality scales, collect responses,

analyze data, and compare their scales psychometrically to similar and contrasting measures.

Implementation of the strategy as described subsequently requires three class sessions, but

instructors can simplify the approach. The activity as presented also requires 2–3 hours of

simple word processing and data entry that a student assistant could complete.

Session One: Scale Construction

Once the instructor has established small groups (groups of 5–9 students work well), the first

session begins with a discussion of commonly researched personality traits and strategies for

Teaching Critical Thinking in Psychology: A Handbook of Best Practices Edited by D. S. Dunn, J. S. Halonen, and R. A. Smith