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Constructing a critical thinking evaluation framework for college students majoring in the humanities
INTRODUCTION: Education for sustainable development (ESD) has focused on the promotion of sustainable thinking skills, capacities, or abilities for learners of different educational stages. Critical thinking (CT) plays an important role in the lifelong development of college students, which is also...
Autores principales: | , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
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Frontiers Media S.A.
2022
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9732107/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36506989 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1017885 |
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author | Li, Suqi Tang, Shenyu Geng, Xingyu Liu, Qi |
author_facet | Li, Suqi Tang, Shenyu Geng, Xingyu Liu, Qi |
author_sort | Li, Suqi |
collection | PubMed |
description | INTRODUCTION: Education for sustainable development (ESD) has focused on the promotion of sustainable thinking skills, capacities, or abilities for learners of different educational stages. Critical thinking (CT) plays an important role in the lifelong development of college students, which is also one of the key competencies in ESD. The development of a valuable framework for assessing college students’ CT is important for understanding their level of CT. Therefore, this study aimed to construct a reliable self-evaluation CT framework for college students majoring in the humanities. METHODS: Exploratory factor analysis (EFA), confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), and Item analysis were conducted to explore the reliability and validity of the CT evaluation framework. Six hundred and forty-two college students majoring in the humanities were collected. The sample was randomly divided into two subsamples (n1 = 321, n2 = 321). RESULTS: The Cronbach’s alpha coefficient for the whole scale was 0.909, and the values of the Cronbach’s alpha coefficients for individual factors of the scale ranged from 0.724 to 0.878. Then CFA was conducted within the scope of the validity study of the scale. In this way, the structure of the 7-factor scale was confirmed. Results indicated that the constructed evaluation framework performed consistently with the collected data. CFA also confirmed a good model fitting of the relevant 22 factors of the college students’ CT framework (χ(2)/df = 3.110, RMSEA = 0.056, GFI = 0.927, AGFI = 0.902, NFI = 0.923, and CFI = 0.946). DISCUSSION: These findings revealed that the CT abilities self-evaluation scale was a valid and reliable instrument for measuring the CT abilities of college students in the humanities. Therefore, the college students’ CT self-evaluation framework included three dimensions: discipline cognition (DC), CT disposition, and CT skills. Among them, CT disposition consisted of motivation (MO), attention (AT), and open-mindedness (OM), while CT skills included clarification skills (CS), organization skills (OS), and reflection (RE). Therefore, this framework can be an effective instrument to support college students’ CT measurement. Consequently, some suggestions are also put forward regarding how to apply the instrument in future studies. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-9732107 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2022 |
publisher | Frontiers Media S.A. |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-97321072022-12-10 Constructing a critical thinking evaluation framework for college students majoring in the humanities Li, Suqi Tang, Shenyu Geng, Xingyu Liu, Qi Front Psychol Psychology INTRODUCTION: Education for sustainable development (ESD) has focused on the promotion of sustainable thinking skills, capacities, or abilities for learners of different educational stages. Critical thinking (CT) plays an important role in the lifelong development of college students, which is also one of the key competencies in ESD. The development of a valuable framework for assessing college students’ CT is important for understanding their level of CT. Therefore, this study aimed to construct a reliable self-evaluation CT framework for college students majoring in the humanities. METHODS: Exploratory factor analysis (EFA), confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), and Item analysis were conducted to explore the reliability and validity of the CT evaluation framework. Six hundred and forty-two college students majoring in the humanities were collected. The sample was randomly divided into two subsamples (n1 = 321, n2 = 321). RESULTS: The Cronbach’s alpha coefficient for the whole scale was 0.909, and the values of the Cronbach’s alpha coefficients for individual factors of the scale ranged from 0.724 to 0.878. Then CFA was conducted within the scope of the validity study of the scale. In this way, the structure of the 7-factor scale was confirmed. Results indicated that the constructed evaluation framework performed consistently with the collected data. CFA also confirmed a good model fitting of the relevant 22 factors of the college students’ CT framework (χ(2)/df = 3.110, RMSEA = 0.056, GFI = 0.927, AGFI = 0.902, NFI = 0.923, and CFI = 0.946). DISCUSSION: These findings revealed that the CT abilities self-evaluation scale was a valid and reliable instrument for measuring the CT abilities of college students in the humanities. Therefore, the college students’ CT self-evaluation framework included three dimensions: discipline cognition (DC), CT disposition, and CT skills. Among them, CT disposition consisted of motivation (MO), attention (AT), and open-mindedness (OM), while CT skills included clarification skills (CS), organization skills (OS), and reflection (RE). Therefore, this framework can be an effective instrument to support college students’ CT measurement. Consequently, some suggestions are also put forward regarding how to apply the instrument in future studies. Frontiers Media S.A. 2022-11-25 /pmc/articles/PMC9732107/ /pubmed/36506989 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1017885 Text en Copyright © 2022 Li, Tang, Geng and Liu. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. |
spellingShingle | Psychology Li, Suqi Tang, Shenyu Geng, Xingyu Liu, Qi Constructing a critical thinking evaluation framework for college students majoring in the humanities |
title | Constructing a critical thinking evaluation framework for college students majoring in the humanities |
title_full | Constructing a critical thinking evaluation framework for college students majoring in the humanities |
title_fullStr | Constructing a critical thinking evaluation framework for college students majoring in the humanities |
title_full_unstemmed | Constructing a critical thinking evaluation framework for college students majoring in the humanities |
title_short | Constructing a critical thinking evaluation framework for college students majoring in the humanities |
title_sort | constructing a critical thinking evaluation framework for college students majoring in the humanities |
topic | Psychology |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9732107/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36506989 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1017885 |
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