ASSESSMENT OF CRITICAL THINKING AND CIVIC THINKING IN INTRODUCTORY SCIENCE CLASSES

The development of critical thinking and civic thinking skills in undergraduate students are often cited as educational goals of colleges and universities. However, instructors struggle with the challenge of assessing these skills in their classes. This presentation describes the development of common instruments to assess improvements in students' critical and civic thinking skills. Over four semesters, 29 instructors (teaching 34 total courses) at four metropolitan higher education institutions (Central Connecticut State University, Portland State University, University of Akron, and Wagner College) participated in the study. The courses were mostly introductory science and interdisciplinary general education courses serving first- and second-year students. In all of the courses, students were given a common exercise as a pre-course assessment during the first week of class and as a post-course exercise during the final week.

Students were also presented a series of additional exercises as homework assignments. Instructors applied one of four protocols that involved varying degrees of feedback on the homeworks. More than 700 students completed both assessment exercises. Anonymously coded pre- and post-course exercises were assessed by evaluators who assigned each response a unit score from 1 through 5 according to separate SOLO and Civic Thinking taxonomies. The correlation of the scores between the evaluators was very strong (Cronbach's alpha 0.9). Student improvement was greatest in classes that included a thorough deconstruction of student answers following each homework assignment. Simply providing students with grading rubrics was not sufficient to produce a positive difference in pre/post scores. Statistically significant gains were reported for classes were students were provided with feedback that matched the characteristics of student response with specific grading levels. This feedback took various forms, including discussion, sample answers, or detailed scoring rubrics. Generally, the more detailed the feedback, the more statistically significant the improvement in critical and civic thinking skills.