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Project History
In 1996, the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology (CTLT), the General
Education Program, and the Writing Programs collaborated to develop a
seven-dimension critical thinking rubric derived from scholarly work and local
practice and expertise to provide a process for improving and a means for
measuring students’ higher order thinking skills during the course of their
college careers.
The 1999 Progress Report on the WSU Writing Portfolio showed that 92% of student
writers received passing ratings or higher on junior-level Writing Portfolios,
indicating that an overwhelming majority of upper-division students demonstrated
writing proficiency as defined by WSU faculty. However, a pilot critical thinking evaluation session conducted in the
summer of 1999 on papers from three senior-level courses revealed surprisingly
low critical thinking abilities (a mean of 2.3 on a 6 point scale).
In
December 1999, several WSU units working collaboratively on these issues sought
funding from the Washington State Higher Education
Coordinating Board (HECB). We received $65, 000 from the Fund for Innovation in Quality
Undergraduate Education to explore the usefulness of the critical thinking
rubric that had been developed at Washington State University both to foster
student higher order thinking skills and to reform faculty practice.
In the HECB-funded pilot study, we ascertained that
students' critical thinking scores:
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Increased three and a half times as much in a course that overtly
integrated the rubric into instructional expectations, compared with
performances in a course that did not
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Improved more in one semester in those courses than students not
in those courses demonstrated in the two years from freshman to their junior
year, as established by comparison of entry and junior level performances in
WSU's writing assessment data
As we expanded our pool of faculty participants in
the HECB study, we found that some instructors' habitual teaching approaches did
not elicit critical thinking from their students, and it was not easy for them
to change to a mode that would. From these initial studies we concluded the following:
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As a faculty, we are not eliciting systematically the kinds
of higher order thinking skills that we have defined as our desired program and
course outcomes.
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Therefore, we need to make a shift in our academic culture, so that we focus consciously and
collectively upon our agreed upon goals and use effective means to move our
students to the desired levels of achievement.
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In the WSU critical thinking rubric, we have an instrument capable of
helping us achieve that shift in our teaching practices. The rubric has proven useful as a diagnostic tool for faculty in
evaluating their own practices and testing the outcomes of different approaches
objectively.
Washington State University has now received a three-year, $380, 000 grant from the
U. S. Department of Education FIPSE Comp
rehensive Program to integrate assessment
with instruction in order to increase coherence and promote higher order thinking in
a four-year General Education curriculum at a large, Research-I, public
university, and to work with our two- and four-year counterparts in the State of
Washington. During FIPSE CT project, we will enlist 120 faculty in
the General Education core courses representing a variety of disciplines to
adopt the new assessment instrument, revise their own pedagogies in terms of the
program goals and outcomes, and develop innovative combinations of teaching and
assessment based on the instrument. This
project will yield the following results:
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A replicable model for assessing the outcomes of broad General
Education goals at a large, public university.
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A set of courses distributed horizontally and vertically
throughout Washington State University’s General Education curriculum which
are designed both to promote the development of a shared definition of critical
thinking skills and to provide assessments of effective teaching and learning
related to those skills.
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Further development of existing, complementary assessment
tools—including but not limited to the Critical Thinking Rubric—that can
provide faculty at any institution with means for assessing students’ learning
outcomes.
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An objective means of faculty self-assessment of their teaching
effectiveness based on their students' progress in reaching learning goals.
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A book-length edited collection, written by faculty engaged in this project, of successful,
assessment-friendly teaching methods and setting out the assessment data that
establish the effectiveness of those methods.
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Dissemination efforts that reach state-wide in order to articulate critical thinking
expectations between two- and four-year institutions.
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