Inquiry Workshop-Assessing Critical Thinking
A printable version of this information can be found here.
Overview
- PURPOSE OF CORE CURRICULUM/GENERAL EDUCATION & ASSESSMENT
- INQUIRY COURSES IN THE CORE
- ASSESSING CRITICAL THINKING
- APPLICATION ACTIVITY: SYLLABUS REVIEW (5-10 Mins)
- APPLICATION ACTIVITY: PRACTICE EXAMPLE ARTIFACT ASSESSMENT (15 Mins)
- ASSESSMENT PROCESS OVERVIEW & NEXT STEPS
- IMPACT & DATA FLOW
Assessing Critical Thinking
It is all about assessing critical thinking not you or your course!
What is the Purpose of a Core/General Education Curriculum?
To provide students a broad base of knowledge and experiences and develop their creative and intellectual potential, whatever their specific majors may be.
Why Do We Assess Student Learning in Core?
- How do we know if students are learning and developing CORE knowledge, skills and habits of mind, if we’re only assessing subject content outcomes?
- How can we improve our core curriculum?
What does it mean to be an Inquiry Core course?
- The central goal of every Inquiry course is to provide students with an understanding of the methods used to discover and create the factual and theoretical knowledge of the discipline.
- Inquiry Core courses are intended to improve students’
- Understanding of disciplinary methods, including the kinds of questions asked in the discipline and the methods that practitioners use to explore those questions
- Demonstrate critical thinking skills within the field.
- Demonstrate communication skills.
How do students demonstrate critical thinking skills?
What are the skills we’re looking for?
- 1) Reason using relevant evidence gathered, evaluated and synthesized as appropriate for the scholarly, disciplinary or interdisciplinary field to create meaningful information.
- 2) Analyze, construct, or critique arguments or data considering premises, assumptions, contexts, and conclusions and anticipate counterarguments and respectfully consider, accommodate or incorporate opposing viewpoints as appropriate.
- 3) Demonstrate creative or innovative approaches to asking and answering questions, defining problems, identifying solutions, and creating knowledge or art.
Characteristics of Assignments that Promote Critical Thinking
- Academic Prompts
- Open-ended questions or problems
- Ill-structured, require development of a strategy
- Involve analysis, application, synthesis, and evaluation
- Require explanation or defense of the answer given
- Performance Tasks and Projects
- Comples challenges that mirror the issues and problems faced by adults
- Feature a setting that is real or simulated
- Require students to address and identified audience
- Allow students greater opportunity to personalize the task
- Task, criteria, and standards are known in advance and guide student's work
Source: Wiggins, G. P., McTighe, J., Kiernan, L. J., Frost, F., & Association for
Supervision and Curriculum Development. (1998). Understanding by design. Alexandria, Va: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
What Does Your Syllabus Say?
- Review your own syllabus
- How are these critical thinking skills and habits are taught and demonstrated to students in your courses?
- How do students demonstrate through work in course, labs, or recitations, that critical thinking skills and habits are being developed?
- Share your findings at your table and p ick three examples to share with the group
What is an “Assessment Artifact”?
- Let's Recap
Let's Assess!
- At each table is an example of a student project/assignment. Using the provided rubric, evaluate the student’s work individually (10 minutes)
- Compare your results at your table (5 minutes)
- Report out –
- How close did your assessment compare to each other?
- What were some of your observations as you applied the rubric to the student artifact?
- At this point you might be asking yourself:
- How will this work? How much time will it take?
- How many artifacts will I have to assess?
Process:
- Each instructor will be asked to submit 5 RANDOMLY selected artifacts demonstrating Critical Thinking from their course(s)
- Artifacts will be organized and then distributed to different faculty who teach in the same inquiry area (IH/RH, IA/RA, IS/RS, IN/RN). Faculty will NOT be assessing their own student’s work or work from a departmental colleagues class.
- Each faculty will assess 5 artifacts and report their findings in a Qualtrics Survey
- THAT’S IT….and the Provost Office will post specific directions on the Core 2.0 website which is available as a link on the Office of the Provost webpage. We will also communicate with you and your department heads via email with directions.
What Happens to the Data?
- Information provided by the assessment survey will only demonstrate how well we are developing critical thinking skills among our students. (It will not be disaggregated at the course level)
- Results of the survey will be provided to all faculty and posted on our CORE website
- Information gathered will generate potential CFE workshops and trainings for future assessment activities.
- Remember: It’s all about continued quality improvement of student learning