Designing Critical Thinking Assessments

• Closing the critical thinking gap in higher education means examining not just student performance but also the effectiveness of educators’ assessment practices.
• Effective critical thinkers must possess both the cognitive abilities and the innate disposition to apply those skills.
• Well-designed assessments go beyond recall, requiring students to apply evidence-based reasoning, take ownership of their conclusions, and demonstrate accountability for the problems they solve.

Transcript

Angelito Calma: [00:10] There is a lot of concern that our students lack critical thinking. But I think, in our research, we suggest that we should look at the problem not just as a student problem but also as a teacher problem.

[00:24] The teacher problem is that we may just not know how to assess critical thinking. We know when we see it, but we don’t foster it in ways that ensure our assessments are robust enough to actually assess the critical-thinking abilities we observe.

[00:46] Well, the first thing to understand is that critical thinking comprises abilities and dispositions. So, these two have to go together. A good critical thinker should have a number of different abilities to display critical thinking. Then you should also be disposed to exercise those abilities to become a critical thinker.

[01:12] I think the dispositions are there. The students take care in their preparation for the assessments. They are inquisitive. They are open-minded when it comes to being disposed to exercising those skills.

[01:27] When they exercise those skills in an assessment, we need an assessment that fosters or creates an environment where they are allowed to exercise those skills. How can we design an environment where students actually develop critical thinking?

A good critical thinker should have a number of different abilities to display critical thinking.

[01:47] There are three ways we can do that. One of them would be to first revise our learning objectives or learning outcomes to be more directed toward developing or fostering critical thinking. If we have learning outcomes that are, remember, these are deliverables, these are our promises to our students, these learning outcomes.

[02:08] So, if we set them too low, we’re not really asking for critical thinking to take place. If we set them too high, they might not be within their limits in terms of ability to learn them over the course of, say, a semester.

[02:27] I think, if we can strike a balance in terms of getting the right deliverables or promises in the learning outcomes, where we ask them to analyze, synthesize, and evaluate. That’s really important to set those deliverables as a set of statements in the learning outcomes.

[02:46] The second one will be the teaching and learning activities. It’s the design of how we engage with students and how they engage with us and with the material they are learning in class.

[02:57] The more we can foster that happening, especially if we are picking on a lot of the cases, real-life examples from the industry and businesses, for example, on what’s out there in terms of decision-making and problem-solving, and bring that into the classroom.

We’re missing that connection between assessment and teaching and learning activities

[03:15] The third one is: if we can create these learning outcomes, design them as deliverables, and work toward aligning the teaching and learning activities to meet those learning outcomes, how do we now ensure that they are learning or thinking critically? That’s where the assessment can come in.

[03:35] A really good design in the assessment, where we’re not just assessing rote learning of dates, names of people, or fundamental ideas and concepts in our discipline, but if we design assessments where they critically analyze and use evidence to support their conclusions, for example, or make recommendations and own with accountability the problem that they are solving and making an impact in terms of, ‘Oh, okay, this is a problem, I’ve solved it. I’m responsible for my solutions. I’m accountable for it. This is how I did it. I supported it. I used evidence, I used information. It’s not fake news; it’s not from dubious websites or information I got it from. I really look into analyzing all these things, and therefore, this is my decision, and I want to back it up.’

[04:35] I think if we create assessments where that is fostered and not just fill-in-the-blank-statements, or simple exams where they’re not really asking them to analyze, evaluate, and synthesize, I think we’re missing that connection between assessment and teaching and learning activities.

[04:58] It’s very important that we align everything: the learning objectives that we want to deliver in the subject and the teaching and learning activities that we design and create for them, and then how we assess them to know that they’ve learned to think critically.