Faculty Driven Assessment of Critical Thinking: National Dissemination of the CAT Instrument

Abstract

This paper reports the latest findings of a project to nationally disseminate the CAT© instrument, a unique interdisciplinary assessment tool for evaluating students’ critical thinking skills. Tennessee Technological University originally partnered with six other institutions across the U.S. to evaluate and refine the CAT instrument beginning in 2004. Through these efforts a test with high face validity, high construct validity, high reliability, and that is culturally fair was developed In the current national dissemination project, we are collaborating with over 40 institutions across the country to disseminate this unique instrument and support the creation of assessment based efforts to improve student learning. These dissemination efforts involved training representatives from other institutions to lead scoring workshops on their own campuses as part of a broader effort to improve student learning. A variety of findings indicate these dissemination efforts are successful. National user norms that are being collected from this project indicate that largest gains in undergraduate critical thinking appear to occur in the junior and senior years. ¹

¹ Partial support for this work was provided by the National Science Foundation’s CCLI Program under grants 0404911 and 0717654. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.