Critical Thinking assessment: a first approach to the automatic evaluation

Critical thinking is a well-established concept but difficult to define. This article presents a prototype for the automatic evaluation of critical thinking through Natural Language Processing techniques in order to quantify four macro-indicators of critical thinking. The system works on answers given to open questions and recognize the basic language skills, relevance, importance and novelty on the given text. In the future we will try to include all the macro-indicators of critical thinking and provide an experimental evaluation of the system.