ABSTRACT
Critical-thinking skills are applicable over an array of academic disciplines and can be improved by both teaching and assessment. Standardized tests of such skills have the advantage of being reliable, valid, and comparable. Value-added models can be used to estimate the growth in learning between the freshman and senior years. There are significant inter-and intra-institutional variations in the effectiveness of efforts to develop critical thinking. Learning is highly situated and context bound and can be defined as applying what one knows to new situations. We conclude that there is no empirical interaction between the content of a performance-task prompt and an examinee’s academic major. CLA scores increase significantly over the course of college and . . . some colleges contribute substantially more than others to students’ learning. If we taught students to do well on CLA tasks, which mimic the real-world tasks we expect them to perform, we would be teaching the competencies we want to develop in students.
