Making thinking skills visible in elementary education: psychometric development of an evaluation tool
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Abstract
INTRODUCTION. The competencies of the 21st century always include critical thinking (CT) and project a growing demand on educational innovation, because CT is not a usual content of school education. The lack of CT evaluation instruments for primary education hinders its visibility and teaching and justifies the aim of this study: to validate a cultural-free CT evaluation test for primary education and to establish its psychometric properties. METHOD. The usual prescriptions for empirical test development are followed in a process involving two test forms that are applied to two different samples of sixth grade of primary education, and statistical refinements between the two forms. Correlational exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis are applied to check test validity and reliability. By construction the test assesses five theoretical skills: prediction, comparison, classification, problem solving and logical reasoning. RESULTS. The results describe the statistics of items and skills, and confirm an empirical structure of a 29-item final test and four empirical factors (prediction-confirmation, expanded classification, problem solving and new reasoning). The parsimonious interpretation of the factors together with appropriate goodness-of-fit parameters (GFI .962) and the reliability of the factors and the final test (.966) support the psychometric validity of the test to evaluate thinking in primary education. DISCUSSION. The instrument’s psychometric properties of validity, goodness-of-fit and reliability prove its usefulness for visibility, evaluation and research of thinking in primary
education. Furthermore, the unidimensional nature of the four empirical factors justifies independent applications of each of them. Finally, some psychometric limitations suggest potential
prospective lines for future developments and applications to continue improving the quality of the instrument.
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