Documentation:Supporting Critical Thinking Online/Assessment and Critical Thinking

Assessment and Critical Thinking

Garrison et al. (2001) write:

Judging the quality of critical thinking as an outcome within a specific educational context is the responsibility of a teacher as the pedagogical and content expert. As a product, critical thinking is, perhaps, best judged through individual educational assignments. The difficulty of assessing critical thinking as a product is that it is a complex and (only indirectly) accessible cognitive process.

As facilitators, you will have responsibility for assessing your learners’ work, even if the grading scale in use is as simple as complete/incomplete. How should you start to think about ways of making sure your learners progress towards the learning goals you have for them? Assessment rubrics can make this task easier. A rubric is a scoring guide that describes criteria for student performance and differentiates among different levels of performance within those criteria. Because rubrics set forth specific criteria and define precise requirements for meeting those criteria they provide instructors and facilitators with an effective, objective method for evaluating skills that do not generally lend themselves to objective assessment methods.

Rubrics simplify assessment of student work and provide learners with an answer to the age-old "Why did you give it this grade?" question. At their very best, rubrics provide learners with standards and expectations they can use to evaluate their performance while completing the assignment.

You can find myriad rubrics for every subject on the web, and in print materials designed for educators. However, the most useful rubrics are usually those you create yourself. Not only can you craft them to exactly meet the goals of your course or course module, but the process of designing a rubric can help you clarify for yourself exactly the criteria you will use to evaluate your learners work.

In his article Designing scoring rubrics for your classroom. Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation, Craig Mertler (Bowling Green State University) explains the difference between a rubric and a checklist, differentiates between holistic and analytic rubrics and describes a step by step process for designing your own assessment rubric.

Washington State University has developed a critical thinking rubric that can be adapted to reflect critical thinking processes.