Abstract

MANASSERO-MAS, María Antonia  and  VAZQUEZ-ALONSO, Ángel. Thinking Skills and School Grades in Secondary Education: Validation of A Culture-Free Assessment Instrument. Rev. Fac. Cienc. Tecnol. [online]. 2020, n.48, pp.33-54.  Epub Apr 30, 2021. ISSN 0121-3814.  https://doi.org/10.17227/ted.num48-12375.

Both the focus and concern of critical thinking have been placed upon the development of teaching programs rather than upon evaluating the impact of the programs; therefore, this research article study aims at the evaluation of the thinking skills of Spanish students at the end of secondary education (15-16 years), its relationship with learning grades and the validation of the assessment instrument. The latter is planned as a culture-free instrument with an important figurative component, and is designed to evaluate four skills: deduction, assumptions, sequencing and decision making. The results facilitate a diagnosis of students' skills, and they highlight the most important finding -the significant and high correlation between the students' school grades and the thinking skills scores, which tend to be higher in mathematical and scientific subjects. The psychometric results on the instrument validity and reliability are good for figurative issues and lower for verbal issues, in spite of the fact that the latter are drawn from standardized critical thinking assessment instruments constructed by other authors. Finally, the importance of the results for education is discussed -as they confirm the cross-cutting relevance that thinking skills might have for school learning- and some issues related to the assessment instrument are pondered in order to improve its validity and reliability.

Keywords : Critical thinking; skill assessment; competence learning; school grades; validity; reliability.

        · abstract in Spanish | Portuguese     · text in Spanish     · Spanish ( pdf )