67
The Challenge of Assessing Critical Thinking
that requires evidence of critical thinking in each class, whether through applied
examples or the generation of questions. Although I designed this strategy to be easy
to review and “grade,” I have used it long enough to recognize that the quality of
questions my students can generate when I hold them accountable for doing so has
been one of the most gratifying teaching investments I have made. Although it takes
me longer to “grade” their contributions than merely marking the effort as “good
faith,” as I had intended when I designed the homework pages, the strategy pays off
in much more vigorous class discussion fueled by more interesting class questions.
Clarify performance expectations. Answering the question, “What do you want on this
project?” is likely to produce more satisfying performance from your students.
Building and consistently applying rubrics is not easy—as any advanced placement
reader can tell you—but students respond with great focus and confidence when
we provide more explicit direction. Appendix 3 contains an exemplar of a rubric
I use for a communications project in my intro course.
Require student self-assessment. When students experience the rubric as the basis of their
evaluation, they can learn to be good judges of their own performance and person-
ally benefit from having this critical responsibility (Dunn, McEntarffer, & Halonen,
2004). My goal is to have students learn to be self-directing because I won’t be able
to follow them around with feedback for the rest of their lives. Start simply. Ask
beginning students what the best feature of their project or test performance was.
Then ask what aspects of performance they would improve upon if they magically
had more time. From this introduction to self-critique, students can quickly learn
to apply performance criteria that can lead to improved performance.
Pursue perfection (or at least improvement). Accepting performance assessment as a cen-
tral strategy also means constant tinkering with your standards because student per-
formance provides a feedback loop from which your own skills can be continuously
refined.
Obviously the notion of student learning outcomes has become “best practice.” Starting
with the courageous high school teachers who not only pioneered in this area by develop-
ing the National Standards for Introductory Psychology (American Psychological Association,
2000), we see educators at every level collaborating to try to establish benchmarks for
performance (for a broader discussion of this issue, see Dunn, McCarthy, Baker, Halonen, &
Hill, 2007). The Guidelines for the Undergraduate Psychology Major (American Psychological
Association, 2007) have been approved by the APA and have already been influential for
departments across the country dealing with accountability demands. Community college
educators embarked on a project to fill in the missing developmental gaps in the Guidelines
to tie together lower level and advanced work in the major (Puccio, 2006). A group of
clinical directors collaborated to produce competence standards for scientifically trained
therapists (Bieschke, Fouad, Collins, & Halonen, 2005). This array of activity demon-
strates that performance assessment has been embraced across the psychology curriculum
from alpha to omega.
Big Idea #8: If you must measure the masses, objective measurement options abound and become
richer every year.