Introduction
The standardized critical thinking tests examined so far in this book are instruments designed to test the abilities of students. In attaining excellence in education, one might go further and assess the teachers, the programs, and the institutions that attempt to make higher-order thinking (a “quality education”) a key component of their mission. Although the importance of critical thinking has been widely recognized, it is difficult to gauge the success of critical thinking courses. Evaluating schools and post-secondary programs is more difficult, in part, because of the huge expense of testing large groups of students over time.
One might avoid the expense of full-scale program evaluation by using standardized or summative assessments to evaluate specific aspects of courses or programs. But in that case, one must choose what aspects or criteria taught within the course or program are most central (and so should be tested). Even if one limits oneself to course evaluation, critical thinking involves such a wide range of skills and dispositions that it is difficult to create one test that reliably and validly encompasses it. Such issues are exacerbated in the evaluation of educational programs because it is a daunting task to decide what and when to evaluate, and to effectively evaluate all stages of a program.
In attempting to evaluate approaches to teaching courses, or programs and schools, it is difficult to know how to proceed. One way is to use the available tests to evaluate the quality of student learning and then to make limited conclusions about the overall quality of education in a given course, program, or school. Another way is to assess the quality of approaches to teaching critical thinking, or education programs designed at delivering critical thinking curricula. The chapters in Part Three look at critical thinking instruction from the point of view of experienced critical thinking teachers, and those who have developed and implemented innovative critical thinking approaches, programs, or curricula at various levels.
In Chapter Seven, Roland Case advocates a “tools” approach to critical thinking. His approach recognizes different kinds of intellectual resources that function as components of critical thinking — back-ground knowledge, criteria for judgment, critical thinking vocabulary, thinking strategies, and habits of mind. Case describes these components and provides examples that illustrate how they can be incorporated into teaching and assessment practices.
In making background knowledge a key component of critical thinking, Case views critical thinking as discipline specific. In Chapter Eight, Gerald Nosich takes this view further and develops an approach to critical thinking teaching and its assessment that is intended for courses in specific subjects (rather than a stand-alone critical thinking course). His general reasoning assessments strategy is focused on teaching with what he calls “fundamental and powerful” concepts, and can be transferred to teaching within any discipline.
In Chapter Nine, Donald Hatcher describes the Baker University critical thinking program. Designed to make critical thinking a central component of liberal arts education at Baker University, the program represents one of the most ambitious attempts to incorporate critical thinking within education. The resulting program is unique in many ways, especially because it has been the subject of an annual assessment for fifteen years. In this way the Baker experience provides not just an example which might be emulated but also fifteen years of assessment data that can be used in comparing and assessing other programs.
In the final chapter in this section, Frans van Eemeren and Bart Garssen introduce the “Pragma-Dialectical” approach to critical thinking. Developed in Amsterdam, this approach has become one of today’s most influential theories of argument (in many fields, argumentation is a central part of the critical thinking exercise). In pragma-dialectics, argumentation is seen as an attempt to reconcile differences of opinion between two opposing parties, hence the “dialectics.” Van Eemeren and Garssen not only describe pragma-dialectic theory and its teaching methods, but explain how to use pragma-dialectics to evaluate their students’ critical discussions in the classroom.
