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The Challenge of Assessing Critical Thinking
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Student metacognition: When we are explicit in our expectations about student learn-ing outcomes, students can develop a much better and richer understanding of the
goals we have for them. As a consequence, they should be able to describe themselves
in advantageous ways in employment interviews and graduate school competition.
● Institutional identity: When we forge a common mission, the activity can facilitate
institutional “branding.” In the competitive atmosphere of postmodern higher edu-
cation, a recognizable brand can produce marketing advantages for students looking
for an appealing institution that is a good match for their dreams.
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Accreditation success: When you must offer evidence of effectiveness that illustrateshow you are meeting your institutional vision, a common expectation can produce
positive response from accreditors. At University of West Florida’s most recent accred-
iting visit by the Southern Association of College and Universities (SACS), we were
pleasantly surprised to find that our coherent assessment proposal engaged the site
visitors enthusiastically, well beyond our expectations for the positive colla boration
that we had anticipated. Our institutional definition of critical thinking, illustrated in
Appendix 1, provides for a generic approach across disciplines that resulted in our accre-
diting team rooting for our success in implementing the proposed assessment plan.
Big Idea #5: Even within psychology, critical thinking takes multiple forms.
Even within the discipline of psychology, there isn’t just one form of critical thinking.
A point I tried to make in The Critical Thinking Companion (1996; Halonen & Gray, 2001)
is that we pursue different kinds of critical thinking objectives across the variety of course
experiences we offer, including:
● pattern recognition
● practical problem solving
● creative problem solving
● scientific problem solving
● psychological reasoning
● perspective taking.
And each of those processes has a distinctive developmental path. For example, if we want
students to use psychological theory to explain behavior, we have to recognize that novices
will not be sophisticated in this skill at the outset. They need practice with basic psycho-
logical concepts, recognizing when concepts are appropriate to apply, and then seeing how
concepts can be linked to produce more complex predictions in psychological theory. As
their expertise grows, their theory skills become more sophisticated, including the ability
to criticize existing theory and even invent new theory, If we try to capture how this
growth becomes apparent within the psychology curriculum, novice-to-expert progression
might look something like the following:
Concept recognition®
Concept application®
Theory recognition®