Critical thinking is one of the most important skills deemed necessary for college graduates to become effective contributors in the global workforce. The first part of this article provides a comprehensive review of its definitions by major frameworks in higher education and the workforce, existing assessments and their psychometric qualities, and challenges surrounding the design, implementation, and use of critical thinking assessment. In the second part, we offer an operational definition that is aligned with the dimensions of critical thinking identified from the reviewed frameworks and discuss the key assessment considerations when designing a next‐generation critical thinking assessment. This article has important implications for institutions that are currently using, planning to adopt, or designing an assessment of critical thinking.

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With the pressing need for accountability in higher education, standardized outcomes assessments have been widely used to evaluate learning and inform policy. However, the critical question on how scores are influenced by students’ motivation has been insufficiently addressed. Using random assignment, we administered a multiple-choice test and an essay across three motivational conditions. Students’ self-report motivation was also collected. Motivation significantly predicted test scores. A substantial performance gap emerged between students in different motivational conditions (effect size as large as .68). Depending on the test format and condition, conclusions about college learning gain (i.e., value added) varied dramatically from substantial gain (d = 0.72) to negative gain (d = −0.23). The findings have significant implications for higher education stakeholders at many levels.

ABSTRACT:We use a construct-based assessment approach to measure learning progression of energy concepts across physical, life, and earth science contexts in middle school grades. We model the knowledge integration construct in six levels in terms of the numbers of ideas and links used in student-generated explanations. For this study, we selected 10 items addressing energy source, transformation, and conservation from published standardized tests and administered them to a status quo sample of 2688 middle school students taught by 29 teachers in 12 schools across 5 states. Results based on a Rasch partial credit model analysis indicate that conservation items are associated with the highest knowledge integration levels, followed by transformation and source items. Comparisons across three middle school grades and across physical, life, and earth science contexts reveal that the mean knowledge integration level of eighth-grade students is signiÞcantly higher than that of sixth-or seventh-grade students, and that the mean knowledge integration level of students who took a physical science course is signiÞcantly higher than that of students who took a life or earth science course. We discuss implications for research on learning progressions.

The modern wave of globalization has created a demand for increased intercultural competence (ICC) in college graduates who will soon enter the 21st‐century workforce. Despite the wide attention to the concepts and assessment of ICC, few assessments meet the standards for a next‐generation assessment in areas of construct clarity, innovative item types, response processes, and validity evidence. The objectives of this report are to identify current conceptualizations of ICC, review existing assessments and their validity evidence, propose a new framework for a next‐generation ICC assessment, and discuss key assessment considerations. To summarize, we found the current state of the literature to be murky in terms of the clarity of the ICC construct. Definitions of the construct vary considerably as to whether it is a trait, skill, or performance outcome. In addition, current measurements of ICC overly rely on self‐report methods, which have a number of flaws that result in less than optimal assessment. In this paper, we propose a new framework based on a model of the social thinking process developed by Grossman and colleagues that describes the knowledge, skills, and abilities that promote success in complex social situations. From this social process model, as well as Earley and Peterson's definition of ICC (a person's capability to gather, interpret, and act upon these radically different cues to function effectively across cultural settings or in a multicultural situation), three stages are developed: approach, analyze, and act. Guided by this framework, we discuss assessment considerations such as innovative task types and multiple response formats to help translate the framework to an assessment of ICC.