Assessment of University Students’ Critical Thinking: Next Generation Performance Assessment

Following employers’ criticisms and recent societal developments, policymakers and educators have called for students to develop a range of generic skills such as critical thinking (“twenty-first century skills”). So far, such skills have typically been assessed by student self-reports or with multiple-choice tests. An alternative approach is criterion-sampling measurement. This approach leads to developing performance assessments using “criterion” tasks, which are drawn from real-world situations in which students are being educated, both within and across academic or professional domains. One current project, iPAL (The international Performance Assessment of Learning), consolidates previous research and focuses on the next generation performance assessments. In this paper, we present iPAL’s assessment framework and show how it guides the development of such performance assessments, exemplify these assessments with a concrete task, and provide preliminary evidence of its reliability and validity, which allows us to draw initial implications for further test design and development.