Validation Study of the Critical Thinking Dispositions Scale: A Brief Report

In recent years, the ability to think critically has become an increasingly important topic to researchers and educators alike (e.g., Ennis, 2008; Ku, 2009). While a handful of scales are available to measure critical thinking, very few scales exist to measure critical thinking dispositions, which can be thought of as the tendency to be predisposed to or be oriented towards critical thinking. One recent effort to this end was by Sosu (2013), in his development of the 11-item Critical Thinking Dispositions Scale (CTDS). While an initial study showed support for a two-factor solution on a U.K. sample (Sosu, 2013), additional validation work is needed, including establishing the convergent validity of the scale, as well as examining the factorial validity of the scale on participants from other countries. Therefore, in the current study, the reliability, factor structure, and convergent validity of the CTDS will be investigated on an ethnically diverse sample of U.S. participants. This study adds to previous work by not only by providing the first examination of the convergent validity of the scale, but also by examining the fit of the CTDS on a more parsimonious one-factor model using CFA. METHOD CTDS and Need for Cognition Scale (NCS; Cacioppo, Petty, & Kao, 1984) were administered to an ethnically diverse sample of 210 undergraduates (69% female, M age = 19.19 years, SD = 1.09, range = 18 to 22; 53.9% Latino/a, 20.6% Caucasian, 18.6% Asian, 3.9% African American, 2.9% other) enrolled in an introductory psychology course at a university in the western United States in the spring 2014 semester. Students received credit towards a research requirement for their participation. After providing informed consent, participants completed the scales online, where they were instructed to select the response that best characterized how they felt on each item of interest. CTDS is an 11-item measure of critical thinking dispositions. Sample items include am often on the lookout for new and usually try to think about the bigger picture during a discussion. Previous work on the scale reported a coefficient alpha of .79 on total scale scores (Sosu, 2013). While Suso (2013) found support for the factorial validity of the scale on a sample of U.K. students, the convergent validity has yet to be investigated. NCS is an 18-item scale that measures one's interest in engaging in cognitive processes. Sample items include The notion of thinking abstractly is appealing to me, and only think as hard as I have to. Numerous studies have examined the psychometric properties of the NCS, with estimates of coefficient alpha obtained from large sample studies generally falling in the .80s to low .90s (see Cacioppo, Petty, Feinstein, & Jarvis, 1996, for a review). structural validity of the scale has been supported through factor analysis (e.g., Cacioppo et al., 1996), while the convergent validity was supported through positive correlations with course performance (r = .28; Sadowski & Gulgoz, 1992) and self-reported grade point average (r = .34; Tolentino, Curry, & Leak, 1990), to name a few examples. While the CTDS and NCS are related in that they both involve the measurement of cognitive processes, they differ in the nature of the specific processes measured. Whereas the NCS focuses on one's general interest in engaging in more strenuous, as opposed to less strenuous, cognitive activity, the CTDS focuses on measuring one's disposition or openness to think critically (e.g., openness to ideas, flexibility in thinking, engaging in meta-cognitive processes). Confirmatory factor analyses were run for a one-factor model, a two-factor model, and both a one- and two-factor model with correlated errors between items 1 and 2 of the CTDS. While Sosu (2013) examined the two-factor models in his work, the fit of a more parsimonious one-factor model was not examined. …