Jane S. Halonen
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Theory application®
Theory evaluation®
Theory creation
Although I don’t think I’ve published this progression formally anywhere, it grew out of
the work I shared with Paul Smith and other colleagues at Alverno College. And it com-
pares favorably with the recent retooling of Bloom’s Taxonomy as completed by Anderson
and Krathwohl (2001).
However, no matter what the version of critical thinking we have chosen to foster as
psychologists, we are still left with the challenge of measuring student progress on that
elusive goal. I want to address three general categories that offer some strategy for measure-
ment, starting with ...
Big Idea #6: The “aha”s should tell you something, even if not psychometrically robust.
Seeing the lights go on in students’ eyes is a powerful and meaningful measure that we
should actively track for feedback on how well we are teaching. However, if we get caught
up in covering the content of the discipline (Eriksen, 1983), we are much more likely to
encourage students to be transcribers and, instead of eyes aglow, you will be treated to a
panorama of hair parts as students pretend to scrutinize their papers in the hopes that you
won’t call on them. Although lit-up eyeballs is an absurd measure for formal accountabi l-
ity, it is an essential one for your own reinforcement as a teacher.
The second general category of measurement is performance assessment, an approach
that has captured a lot of my scholarly focus:
Big Idea #7: Performance assessment is proving its viability and value in measuring critical
thinking.
Who better than psychologists to come up with reasonable behavioral descriptors for
what we think intellectual activity should look like as students move along the contin-
uum from novice to expert? Performance assessment emphasizes specifying the behavio-
ral parameters of what we should expect to see in a student’s performance on a cognitive
task that we have designed, typically evaluated using a rubric (Trice, 2000). The use of
rubrics provides the kind of evidence that makes accreditors happy because the criteria
provide a much richer description of what transpires in a class compared to mere grades.
However, a few pointers are relevant to optimize the results of performance assessment
strategies.
Reward preparation. One of the great frustrations of contemporary college life is how
little time students seem to be putting into classroom preparation. I’m almost embar-
rassed to admit that it has taken me 25 years and the help of some very bright
women (Connor-Greene, 2005; Walvoord, 2004) to solve this problem. I have
included the convergence of their influence in Appendix 2 to demonstrate the strat-
egy I currently use to motivate students to come to class having read the material and
having prepared ideas to explore in class. Students submit a single homework page