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.

There is a paucity of information surrounding maths anxiety levels in the British undergraduate student population, and, due to terminological issues, existing measures of maths anxiety may not be appropriate measures to use with this population. The current study, therefore, reports on the development and validation of a new maths anxiety scale. Using a large sample of British undergraduates, the 23-item Mathematics Anxiety Scale—UK (MAS-UK) is shown to be a reliable and valid measure of maths anxiety. Exploratory factor analysis indicated the existence of three factors, highlighting maths anxiety as a multidimensional construct. Confirmatory factor analysis revealed a good-fitting model. Normative data on maths anxiety in a British undergraduate student population are provided, along with comparisons between academic undergraduate subject areas and genders. The MAS-UK may represent an easily administrable, reliable, and valid tool for assessing maths anxiety in British and potentially European undergraduate student populations.

We report a study examining the role of ‘cognitive miserliness’ as a determinant of poor performance on the standard three-item Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT). The cognitive miserliness hypothesis proposes that people often respond incorrectly on CRT items because of an unwillingness to go beyond default, heuristic processing and invest time and effort in analytic, reflective processing. Our analysis (N = 391) focused on people’s response times to CRT items to determine whether predicted associations are evident between miserly thinking and the generation of incorrect, intuitive answers. Evidence indicated only a weak correlation between CRT response times and accuracy. Item-level analyses also failed to demonstrate predicted response-time differences between correct analytic and incorrect intuitive answers for two of the three CRT items. We question whether participants who give incorrect intuitive answers on the CRT can legitimately be termed cognitive misers and whether the three CRT items measure the same general construct.

Maths anxiety has been the focus of much psychological and educational research in the past few years. In this article, we review some of this research evidence and describe some of the work we have completed. In particular, we will describe what maths anxiety is and how it has been measured, describe some of the consequences of maths anxiety, and finally describe what can be done to alleviate difficulties associated with math anxiety. What is Maths Anxiety? Maths anxiety in many ways is easy to describe and define: it is the feelings of anxiety that some individuals experience when facing mathematical problems. Professor Mark Ashcraft, one of the main researchers in the area, has described it as "Feelings of tension, apprehension, or even dread that interferes with the ordinary manipulation of number and the solving of mathematical problems" (Ashcraft & Faust, 1994). Like other forms of anxiety, students may feel their heart beat more quickly or strongly, they may believe they are not capable of completing mathematical problems, or they may avoid attempting maths courses. Maths anxiety is usually measured by questionnaire. One of the most frequently used questionnaires is the Mathematics Anxiety Rating Scale (MARS, Richardson & Suinn, 1972). This is a 98-item questionnaire in which respondents are asked to rate how anxious they would feel in a variety of maths-specific situations. Such statements include: "Being asked how to explain how you arrived at a particular answer for a problem", "Being asked to remember the telephone numbers of three people you met", and "Counting a pile of change". Since then, a number of further questionnaires have been developed, including the abbreviated 25-item Shortened MARS (sMARS, Alexander and Martray, 1989). In addition, physiological measures have been taken to confirm these self-report indices.