A non-technical guide to some of the popular methods and tests for assessing how well students are acquiring critical thinking skills in their courses, programs, or college careers.

Conductive arguments, as a separate category of reasoning, has experienced a revival. In 2010, the University of Windsor’s Centre for Research in Reasoning, Argumentation, and Rhetoric dedicated a two-day symposium to the topic and later published the proceedings. In this article, I argue against the existence of conductive arguments as a usefully distinct type of argument. Some of what are deemed conductive arguments are simply inductive arguments and some are best construed as subsets of the constituents of what is commonly (...) called a position paper. (shrink)

The topic of conductive arguments, as a separate category of reasoning, is experiencing a revival. In 2010, the University of Windsor’s Centre for Research in Reasoning, Argumentation, and Rhetoric dedicated a two-day symposium to the topic and recently published the proceedings. In this article, I argue against the existence of conductive arguments as a distinct type and argue against a popular analysis of the structure of conductive arguments.

The Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal Test is one of the oldest, most frequently used, multiple-choice critical-thinking tests on the market in business, government, and legal settings for purposes of hiring and promotion. I demonstrate, however, that the test has serious construct-validity issues, stemming primarily from its ambiguous, unclear, misleading, and sometimes mysterious instructions, which have remained unaltered for decades. Erroneously scored items further diminish the test’s validity. As a result, having enhanced knowledge of formal and informal logic could well result (...) in test subjects receiving lower scores on the test. That’s not how things should work for a CT assessment test. (shrink)

The Collegiate Learning Assessment Test has become popular and highly recommended, praised for its reliability and validity. I argue that while the CLA may be a commendable test for measuring critical-thinking, problem-solving, and logical-reasoning skills, those who are scoring students’ answers to the test’s questions are rendering the CLA invalid.

The HCTA test is a recent addition to the commercially available array of critical-thinking assessment tests in higher education. After an introductory description of the test, I critically review it and conclude that, despite the fact that the HCTA is certainly well-intentioned, it has serious flaws with respect to its affordability, accessibility, and validity.

On the nature of definitions and concepts, and the definition of critical thinking.

Some ways of teaching critical thinking seem destine to failure, e.g.,CT across the curriculum, and some obstacles to acquiring CT skills seem insurmountable, e.g., cognitive biases, but some approaches to teaching and learning to think critically, discussed in this article, can mitigate those biases and be demonstrably successful.

The CAT is entirely dedicated to assessing the critical-thinking skills involved in scientific reasoning and practical problem solving. While the test is found to have reasonable content validity, various issues with its prompts are discussed, along with significant issues with its scoring. The CAT’s recommended use as a “model” for curricular changes, called CAT Apps, is criticized as “teaching to the test.”.