Assessing Adolescent Critical Thinking

Critical thinking skills play an important role in the moral development of adolescents. They must analyze, evaluate, and synthesize information gathered from their interactions with others. They must effectively argue, justify, and reflect on their own personal opinions and motivations as they make decisions, impacting on their sense of decision-making responsibilities. Although there is recognition of the importance of critical thinking skills in moral development and learning (Paul, 1993), investigation into the language skills required to competently express one’s thinking and reasoning has received limited attention. The few studies that have focused on language and critical thinking have reported specifically on syntactic aspects (Nippold et al., 2014, 2015). To address this gap between language, thinking, and knowledge, the authors of this article investigate the language used in critical thinking through adolescents’ responses on a task of moral reasoning. Syntactic development in adolescence is characterized by longer and more grammatically complex sentences with greater use of dependent clauses (Heilmann & Malone, 2014; Nippold, 2016). Through the increased use of subordinate clauses, adolescents are able to express more complex ideas. There is an interplay between cognitive and language processes in the adolescent years that supports growth in critical thinking. Semantically, adolescent language growth involves literate language, including the use and understanding of mental state verbs, abstract nouns, and adverbial conjunctions (Nippold et al., 2017). The increasing command of mental state verbs or metacognitive verbs (such as believe, realize, and remember) allows the adolescent to describe and reflect on another’s thoughts and viewpoint. This category of words represents a salient feature of A newsletter dedicated to speech & language in school-age children