The Case for CriticalThinking Skills and （CriticalThinking技能和）.pdf

The Case for Critical-Thinking Skills and Performance Assessment May 2013 Roger Benjamin Stephen Klein Jeffrey Steedle Doris Zahner Scott Elliot Julie Patterson Copyright © 2015 Council for Aid to Education foreword A testing program like the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) is constantly evolving. CAE (Council for Aid to Education) learns from the hundreds of colleges and universities that test with either the CLA or, its high school counterpart, the College and Work Readiness Assessment (CWRA) about what works well, what can be improved, and what new ideas are to be considered for aligning assessment with teaching and learning. We also benefit from the criticisms, comments, and suggestions made through public communications. Working constructively with these criticisms, along with extensive in-house research, has improved the reliability and validity of the CLA. These improvements have led to new concepts for enhancing our existing protocol, such as through CLA Education, which focuses on the teaching and learning implications of the CLA performance assessments. Additionally, new ideas for administering the performance assessments in way that will provide formative and usable results at the student level are being formulated, piloted and—in the near future—implemented. Recently, we at CAE pulled together the full range of perspectives on assessing critical-thinking skills. These perspectives include studies on: the reliability and validity of the CLA performance assessments (conduct