College Students’ Critical Thinking: Assessment and Interpretation

Many colleges identify the development of critical thinking (CT) as a key learning outcome. Nonetheless, few studies examined the development of CT during college, and the instruments employed in them are often limited. This article introduces the Critical Reasoning Assessment (CRA), a new instrument based on the Reflective Judgment Model (RJM; King and Kitchener 1994) designed to engage students in analyzing ethical dilemmas while being easy to administer and score. Using the CRA, we measured the CT skills of college students in three studies, both cross-sectionally and longitudinally. The results demonstrated substantial growth in CT skills during the first year and between the first and the fourth years of college; 42% and 60% of the participants advanced to a higher level of CT by the end of their first and fourth year, respectively. This study introduces a comprehensive, theory-based, easy-to-score and interpret instrument measuring CT. Applied to longitudinal data, it adds to limited findings on CT developmental trajectories and quantifies substantively interpretable shifts in the quality of CT.