Assessing Critical Thinking in STEM and Beyond

This paper reports the latest findings of a project to refine the CAT© instrument, a new interdisciplinary assessment tool for evaluating students’ critical thinking skills. Tennessee Technological University partnered with six other institutions across the U.S. (University of Texas, University of Colorado, University of Washington, University of Hawaii, University of Southern Maine, and Howard University) to evaluate and refine the CAT instrument. The results of this project reveal the CAT instrument has high face validity when evaluated by a broad spectrum of faculty across the U.S. in STEM and non-STEM disciplines, has good criterion validity when compared to other instruments that measure critical thinking and intellectual performance, has good reliability, and good construct validity using expert evaluation in the area of learning sciences. 1