Critical thinking is an important focus in higher education and is essential for good academic achievement. We report the development of a tool to measure critical thinking for three purposes: (i) to evaluate student perceptions and attitudes about critical thinking, (ii) to identify students in need of support to develop their critical thinking, and (iii) to predict academic performance. Seventy-seven items were generated from focus groups, interviews and the critical thinking literature. Data were collected from 133 psychology students. Factor Analysis revealed three latent factors based on a reduced set of 27 items. These factors were characterised as: Confidence in Critical Thinking; Valuing Critical Thinking; and Misconceptions. Reliability analysis demonstrated that the sub-scales were reliable. Convergent validity with measures of grade point average and argumentation skill was shown, with significant correlations between subscales and validation measures. Most notably, in multiple regression analysis, the three sub-scales from the new questionnaire substantially increased the variance in grade point average accounted for by measures of reflective thinking and argumentation. To sum, the resultant scale offers a measure that is simple to administer, can be used as a diagnostic tool to identify students who need support in developing their critical thinking skills, and can also predict academic performance.

One approach to plagiarism prevention focuses on improving students' authorial identity, but work in this area depends on robust measures. This paper presents the development of a psychometrically robust measure of authorial identity -the Student Attitudes and Beliefs about Authorship Scale. In the item generation phase, a pool of items was developed and assessed for content validity by subject matter experts. In the exploratory phase, data from 439 higher education students were used to identify a latent variable model with three factors: 'authorial confidence', 'valuing writing' and 'identification with author'. In the confirmatory phase, data from 306 higher education students were used to test the three-factor model's reliability and validity. The three-factor structure was confirmed, and the results showed the SABAS has a stronger psychometric basis than previously available measures. This measure of authorial identity can be used with confidence in research and pedagogy to help students improve their authorial identity.Keywords: plagiarism; authorial identity; academic writing; psychometrics; pedagogy IntroductionOne approach to reducing unintentional plagiarism is to improve students' authorial identity, so that they understand the role of the author better, and take a more authorial role in the production of their university assignments. This approach has been adopted in psychology (Elander et al. 2010; Kinder and Elander 2012), accounting (Ballantine and Larres, 2012;Ballantine, Guo, and Larres 2013) and health (Maguire, Reynolds, and Delahunt, 2013). All of those studies used the only available questionnaire measure of authorial identity, the Student Authorship Questionnaire (SAQ) (Pittam et al. 2009).This 18-item questionnaire has three scales measuring attitudes to authorship ('confidence in writing', 'understanding authorship', and 'knowledge to avoid 4 plagiarism') and three measuring approaches to writing ('top-down', 'bottom-up' and 'pragmatic').However, the SAQ has substantial psychometric limitations. First, its content validity is questionable, because the items were not systematically generated.Furthermore, the approaches to writing scales are not part of the core authorial identity construct, whereas other important aspects of authorial identity may have been omitted. Second, the six-factor structure may not be valid, for the Eigenvalue-over-one rule that was used to extract factors has been heavily criticised by measurement theorists (e.g., Zwick and Velicer 1986;Hayton, Allen, and Scarpello 2004;Velicer, Eaton, and Fava 2000). There were also multiple cross-loadings (i.e., items that loaded strongly onto more than one factor in the model), and items were only interpreted according to their highest loading, when in one case the difference between loadings was only .03 (Pittam et al., 2009). Third, internal consistency was poor, with Cronbach's (1951) alphas for three scales ranging from poor to moderate, and three other scales with only two items each where Cronbach's alpha was not report...

Research on authorial identity has focused almost exclusively on the attitudes and beliefs of students. This paper explores how academics understand authorial identity in higher education. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 27 professional academics and analysed using thematic analysis, identifying themes at two levels. At the semantic level was a main theme called ‘the authorial writer’, with five subthemes: ‘authorial confidence’, ‘valuing writing’, ‘ownership and attachment’, ‘authorial thinking’, and ‘authorial goals’. At the latent level were two integrative themes: ‘tacit learning’ and ‘negotiating identities’. The semantic subthemes represent attributes that could be targets for pedagogic interventions. The integrative themes suggest processes in the development of authorial identity, which can inform more effective teaching. By identifying attributes and processes associated with authorial identity, these findings help towards a psychological understanding of authorial identity, informing development of more effective pedagogy to help students improve their academic writing and avoid plagiarism