ABSTRACT
Throughout this book, I have attempted to consistently apply Wolcott and Lynch’s adaptation of King and Kitchener’s reflective judgment model in various classroom environments. The strength of this model becomes even clearer when it comes to evaluating the students’ critical thinking skills. There are ways of asking questions that are so challenging as to frustrate the student. Other ways are so simple as to stifle their motivation to learn. Effective evaluation of student performance begins with asking the appropriate questions. As with every other part of the teaching experience at this level, you cannot prejudge anything about the students sitting in front of you. The questions you choose cannot be the ones you wish the students could answer. Instead, they must be the ones that lie just a bit beyond the level of reasoning the students display during the class. This leads to the untenable situation of creating individual tests, tests for subgroups at different levels, or complex tests with several sections or differing cognitive complexity, each weighted differently. It is no wonder that the conventional wisdom on testing has assumed a onesize-fits-all approach.
