Measuring Critical Thinking Skills

Measuring critical thinking skills especially among students is very important. Measuring critical thinking skills is the way to ensure that students are not simply memorizing what is being in class. Measuring critical thinking skills will help the teacher to know whether their teaching skills are working or they simply encourage recalling of concepts. There are a number of effective ways for measuring critical thinking skills.

Testing the critical thinking abilities of students is not an easy exercise. Although educators have tried to come up with a standard rubric of doing so, it is still a process that is quite challenging. A lot of importance is tied to being able to assess whether students have really mastered critical thinking skills. This kind of assessment can help the teachers to change their approach to teaching. The assessment can also help the teacher to identify students who are weak in this area and offer the necessary help.

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How to assess critical thinking skills in students

·         Find out whether the students are able to have multiple perspectives in a given scenario. For example when reading from a text, are they able to consider different angles of looking at a certain issue and if so, are they able to point out the various implications of taking each angle?

·         After being given a lot of information to go through and understand, the teacher can assess the ability of the student to summarize the major points in the discussion. They need to do this without simply copy pasting what was mentioned in the book but by using their own words.

·         The students should be able to draw conclusions. The conclusions should be based on the points presented in a given instance. One can also seek to find out whether they are able to prioritize these points in terms of the most important or strong and so on before reaching a well reasoned conclusion.

·         Students can also be given a chance to develop a theory of their own from a certain context. They should be able to justify their theory using strong points. If they are able to do this, then they have critical thinking skills.

Critical thinking problem solving skills can be learnt at any stage in time. Critical thinking problem solving skills can be instilled when someone is very young. However, not everyone gets the chance to learn Critical thinking problem solving skills at a tender age as is the ideal. The good news is that even when someone is much older, they can still learn and master Critical thinking problem solving skills. 

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