rubric for assessing critical thinking

• A Model for the National Assessment of Higher Order Thinking
• International Critical Thinking Essay Test
• Online Critical Thinking Basic Concepts Test
• Online Critical Thinking Basic Concepts Sample Test

Consequential Validity: Using Assessment to Drive Instruction

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Critical Thinking Testing and Assessment

The purpose of assessment in instruction is improvement. The purpose of assessing instruction for critical thinking is improving the teaching of discipline-based thinking (historical, biological, sociological, mathematical, etc.) It is to improve students’ abilities to think their way through content using disciplined skill in reasoning. The more particular we can be about what we want students to learn about critical thinking, the better we can devise instruction with that particular end in view.

The Foundation for Critical Thinking offers assessment instruments which share in the same general goal: to enable educators to gather evidence relevant to determining the extent to which instruction is teaching students to think critically (in the process of learning content). To this end, the Fellows of the Foundation recommend:

that academic institutions and units establish an oversight committee for critical thinking, and

that this oversight committee utilizes a combination of assessment instruments (the more the better) to generate incentives for faculty, by providing them with as much evidence as feasible of the actual state of instruction for critical thinking.

The following instruments are available to generate evidence relevant to critical thinking teaching and learning:

Course Evaluation Form : Provides evidence of whether, and to what extent, students perceive faculty as fostering critical thinking in instruction (course by course). Machine-scoreable.

Online Critical Thinking Basic Concepts Test : Provides evidence of whether, and to what extent, students understand the fundamental concepts embedded in critical thinking (and hence tests student readiness to think critically). Machine-scoreable.

Critical Thinking Reading and Writing Test : Provides evidence of whether, and to what extent, students can read closely and write substantively (and hence tests students' abilities to read and write critically). Short-answer.

International Critical Thinking Essay Test : Provides evidence of whether, and to what extent, students are able to analyze and assess excerpts from textbooks or professional writing. Short-answer.

Commission Study Protocol for Interviewing Faculty Regarding Critical Thinking : Provides evidence of whether, and to what extent, critical thinking is being taught at a college or university. Can be adapted for high school. Based on the California Commission Study . Short-answer.

Protocol for Interviewing Faculty Regarding Critical Thinking : Provides evidence of whether, and to what extent, critical thinking is being taught at a college or university. Can be adapted for high school. Short-answer.

Protocol for Interviewing Students Regarding Critical Thinking : Provides evidence of whether, and to what extent, students are learning to think critically at a college or university. Can be adapted for high school). Short-answer. 

Criteria for Critical Thinking Assignments : Can be used by faculty in designing classroom assignments, or by administrators in assessing the extent to which faculty are fostering critical thinking.

Rubrics for Assessing Student Reasoning Abilities : A useful tool in assessing the extent to which students are reasoning well through course content.  

All of the above assessment instruments can be used as part of pre- and post-assessment strategies to gauge development over various time periods.

Consequential Validity

All of the above assessment instruments, when used appropriately and graded accurately, should lead to a high degree of consequential validity. In other words, the use of the instruments should cause teachers to teach in such a way as to foster critical thinking in their various subjects. In this light, for students to perform well on the various instruments, teachers will need to design instruction so that students can perform well on them. Students cannot become skilled in critical thinking without learning (first) the concepts and principles that underlie critical thinking and (second) applying them in a variety of forms of thinking: historical thinking, sociological thinking, biological thinking, etc. Students cannot become skilled in analyzing and assessing reasoning without practicing it. However, when they have routine practice in paraphrasing, summariz­ing, analyzing, and assessing, they will develop skills of mind requisite to the art of thinking well within any subject or discipline, not to mention thinking well within the various domains of human life.

For full copies of this and many other critical thinking articles, books, videos, and more, join us at the Center for Critical Thinking Community Online - the world's leading online community dedicated to critical thinking!   Also featuring interactive learning activities, study groups, and even a social media component, this learning platform will change your conception of intellectual development.

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Critical Thinking Rubrics

2021 research-based critical thinking rubrics.

We're pleased to share these research-based Critical Thinking rubrics created in collaboration with the National Center for Improvement of Educational Assessment (Center for Assessment) , based on a comprehensive review of the literature about Critical Thinking. 

• 2021 Critical Thinking Rubric: Grades K-2
• 2021 Critical Thinking Rubric: Grades 3-5
• 2021 Critical Thinking Rubric: Grades 6-12

These research-based rubrics are designed to provide useful, formative information that teachers can use to guide instruction and provide feedback to students on their overall performance. Students can also use the rubrics to reflect on their own learning. 

Looking for older versions of PBLWorks/BIE Critical Thinking Rubrics? You can also find them in the resources section on this page!

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Why Schools Need to Change Yes, We Can Define, Teach, and Assess Critical Thinking Skills

Jeff Heyck-Williams (He, His, Him) Director of the Two Rivers Learning Institute in Washington, DC

Today’s learners face an uncertain present and a rapidly changing future that demand far different skills and knowledge than were needed in the 20th century. We also know so much more about enabling deep, powerful learning than we ever did before. Our collective future depends on how well young people prepare for the challenges and opportunities of 21st-century life.

Critical thinking is a thing. We can define it; we can teach it; and we can assess it.

While the idea of teaching critical thinking has been bandied around in education circles since at least the time of John Dewey, it has taken greater prominence in the education debates with the advent of the term “21st century skills” and discussions of deeper learning. There is increasing agreement among education reformers that critical thinking is an essential ingredient for long-term success for all of our students.

However, there are still those in the education establishment and in the media who argue that critical thinking isn’t really a thing, or that these skills aren’t well defined and, even if they could be defined, they can’t be taught or assessed.

To those naysayers, I have to disagree. Critical thinking is a thing. We can define it; we can teach it; and we can assess it. In fact, as part of a multi-year Assessment for Learning Project , Two Rivers Public Charter School in Washington, D.C., has done just that.

Before I dive into what we have done, I want to acknowledge that some of the criticism has merit.

First, there are those that argue that critical thinking can only exist when students have a vast fund of knowledge. Meaning that a student cannot think critically if they don’t have something substantive about which to think. I agree. Students do need a robust foundation of core content knowledge to effectively think critically. Schools still have a responsibility for building students’ content knowledge.

However, I would argue that students don’t need to wait to think critically until after they have mastered some arbitrary amount of knowledge. They can start building critical thinking skills when they walk in the door. All students come to school with experience and knowledge which they can immediately think critically about. In fact, some of the thinking that they learn to do helps augment and solidify the discipline-specific academic knowledge that they are learning.

The second criticism is that critical thinking skills are always highly contextual. In this argument, the critics make the point that the types of thinking that students do in history is categorically different from the types of thinking students do in science or math. Thus, the idea of teaching broadly defined, content-neutral critical thinking skills is impossible. I agree that there are domain-specific thinking skills that students should learn in each discipline. However, I also believe that there are several generalizable skills that elementary school students can learn that have broad applicability to their academic and social lives. That is what we have done at Two Rivers.

Defining Critical Thinking Skills

We began this work by first defining what we mean by critical thinking. After a review of the literature and looking at the practice at other schools, we identified five constructs that encompass a set of broadly applicable skills: schema development and activation; effective reasoning; creativity and innovation; problem solving; and decision making.

We then created rubrics to provide a concrete vision of what each of these constructs look like in practice. Working with the Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning and Equity (SCALE) , we refined these rubrics to capture clear and discrete skills.

For example, we defined effective reasoning as the skill of creating an evidence-based claim: students need to construct a claim, identify relevant support, link their support to their claim, and identify possible questions or counter claims. Rubrics provide an explicit vision of the skill of effective reasoning for students and teachers. By breaking the rubrics down for different grade bands, we have been able not only to describe what reasoning is but also to delineate how the skills develop in students from preschool through 8th grade.

Before moving on, I want to freely acknowledge that in narrowly defining reasoning as the construction of evidence-based claims we have disregarded some elements of reasoning that students can and should learn. For example, the difference between constructing claims through deductive versus inductive means is not highlighted in our definition. However, by privileging a definition that has broad applicability across disciplines, we are able to gain traction in developing the roots of critical thinking. In this case, to formulate well-supported claims or arguments.

Teaching Critical Thinking Skills

The definitions of critical thinking constructs were only useful to us in as much as they translated into practical skills that teachers could teach and students could learn and use. Consequently, we have found that to teach a set of cognitive skills, we needed thinking routines that defined the regular application of these critical thinking and problem-solving skills across domains. Building on Harvard’s Project Zero Visible Thinking work, we have named routines aligned with each of our constructs.

For example, with the construct of effective reasoning, we aligned the Claim-Support-Question thinking routine to our rubric. Teachers then were able to teach students that whenever they were making an argument, the norm in the class was to use the routine in constructing their claim and support. The flexibility of the routine has allowed us to apply it from preschool through 8th grade and across disciplines from science to economics and from math to literacy.

Kathryn Mancino, a 5th grade teacher at Two Rivers, has deliberately taught three of our thinking routines to students using the anchor charts above. Her charts name the components of each routine and has a place for students to record when they’ve used it and what they have figured out about the routine. By using this structure with a chart that can be added to throughout the year, students see the routines as broadly applicable across disciplines and are able to refine their application over time.

Assessing Critical Thinking Skills

By defining specific constructs of critical thinking and building thinking routines that support their implementation in classrooms, we have operated under the assumption that students are developing skills that they will be able to transfer to other settings. However, we recognized both the importance and the challenge of gathering reliable data to confirm this.

With this in mind, we have developed a series of short performance tasks around novel discipline-neutral contexts in which students can apply the constructs of thinking. Through these tasks, we have been able to provide an opportunity for students to demonstrate their ability to transfer the types of thinking beyond the original classroom setting. Once again, we have worked with SCALE to define tasks where students easily access the content but where the cognitive lift requires them to demonstrate their thinking abilities.

These assessments demonstrate that it is possible to capture meaningful data on students’ critical thinking abilities. They are not intended to be high stakes accountability measures. Instead, they are designed to give students, teachers, and school leaders discrete formative data on hard to measure skills.

While it is clearly difficult, and we have not solved all of the challenges to scaling assessments of critical thinking, we can define, teach, and assess these skills . In fact, knowing how important they are for the economy of the future and our democracy, it is essential that we do.

Jeff Heyck-Williams (He, His, Him)

Director of the two rivers learning institute.

Jeff Heyck-Williams is the director of the Two Rivers Learning Institute and a founder of Two Rivers Public Charter School. He has led work around creating school-wide cultures of mathematics, developing assessments of critical thinking and problem-solving, and supporting project-based learning.

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Critical Thinking Now!

The who, what, where, when, and why of critical thinking

Using Rubrics to Assess Critical Thinking

Assessing critical thinking has been a bugbear for teachers for years. After all, critical thinking is not like a problem in math or historical fact with a discrete answer. It’s a global, all-encompassing thinking pattern. Enter the time-honored rubric—a way to measure progress toward that goal.

There are two kinds of rubrics for assessing critical thinking: analytic and holistic. Analytic methods divide a product into essential dimensions (traits), and each dimension is judged separately. A separate score is given for each dimension or trait considered important for the assessed performance. They take longer but are more sensitive to the nuances of the argument. Holistic rubrics give a single score or rating for an entire product or performance based on overall impression of a student’s work. They are quicker and provide a broader picture of the arguments.

Here are some ideas about formulating your own rubric to assess critical thinking.

• The most manageable analytic rubric has from 3 to 5 categories and no more than 4 levels within each category. More than that is too burdensome.

• Definitions of critical thinking abound, and don’t always agree (understatement). As with all instruments, be clear about what you define as critical thinking and the outcomes you expect. To complicate matters, critical thinking in the humanities may have different criteria than, say, those in the sciences.

• Raters (if more than one) must be trained to achieve interrater reliability.

An analytic approach to assessment can expose trends of learning needs that can guide instruction.

This analytic rubric is from by Susan Wolcott’s site ( http://wolcottlynch.com ), where you can also find a lot of other helpful information about critical thinking.

Analytic rubrics provide the opportunity to score each criteria area individually. This means you can identify deficiency needs of students in specific aspects of learning. A holistic rubric, on the other hand, allows you to give a single score. Grading is much faster than using an analytical one, but less precise. That can be remedied by writing specific notes to the student.

From Microsoft PowerPoint – Designing Rubrics to Assess Critical Thinking.pptx (k-state.edu)

Note: This rubric includes all the criteria that exemplify critical thinking as defined by your program/course/outcomes (as should all rubrics).

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Published by nancy burkhalter.

I am in love with words. Trained as a linguist, journalist and researcher, I write, teach writing, and research everything about writing, especially how writing aids critical thinking. I've taught around the world, including three years in Kazakhstan, and a year each in Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Germany. View more posts

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Critical Thinking Rubric

This rubric is designed to evaluate the extent to which undergraduate students evaluate claims, arguments, evidence, and hypotheses.

Results will be used for program improvement purposes only.

Download the Critical Thinking Rubric (PDF version)

Critical thinking definition

Critical thinking, as described by Oxford Languages, is the objective analysis and evaluation of an issue in order to form a judgement.

Active and skillful approach, evaluation, assessment, synthesis, and/or evaluation of information obtained from, or made by, observation, knowledge, reflection, acumen or conversation, as a guide to belief and action, requires the critical thinking process, which is why it's often used in education and academics.

Some even may view it as a backbone of modern thought.

However, it's a skill, and skills must be trained and encouraged to be used at its full potential.

People turn up to various approaches in improving their critical thinking, like:

• Developing technical and problem-solving skills
• Engaging in more active listening
• Actively questioning their assumptions and beliefs
• Seeking out more diversity of thought
• Opening up their curiosity in an intellectual way etc.

Is critical thinking useful in writing?

Critical thinking can help in planning your paper and making it more concise, but it's not obvious at first. We carefully pinpointed some the questions you should ask yourself when boosting critical thinking in writing:

• What information should be included?
• Which information resources should the author look to?
• What degree of technical knowledge should the report assume its audience has?
• What is the most effective way to show information?
• How should the report be organized?
• How should it be designed?
• What tone and level of language difficulty should the document have?

Usage of critical thinking comes down not only to the outline of your paper, it also begs the question: How can we use critical thinking solving problems in our writing's topic?

Let's say, you have a Powerpoint on how critical thinking can reduce poverty in the United States. You'll primarily have to define critical thinking for the viewers, as well as use a lot of critical thinking questions and synonyms to get them to be familiar with your methods and start the thinking process behind it.

Are there any services that can help me use more critical thinking?

We understand that it's difficult to learn how to use critical thinking more effectively in just one article, but our service is here to help.

We are a team specializing in writing essays and other assignments for college students and all other types of customers who need a helping hand in its making. We cover a great range of topics, offer perfect quality work, always deliver on time and aim to leave our customers completely satisfied with what they ordered.

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Computer Science > Human-Computer Interaction

Title: untangling critical interaction with ai in students written assessment.

Abstract: Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a ubiquitous part of society, but a key challenge exists in ensuring that humans are equipped with the required critical thinking and AI literacy skills to interact with machines effectively by understanding their capabilities and limitations. These skills are particularly important for learners to develop in the age of generative AI where AI tools can demonstrate complex knowledge and ability previously thought to be uniquely human. To activate effective human-AI partnerships in writing, this paper provides a first step toward conceptualizing the notion of critical learner interaction with AI. Using both theoretical models and empirical data, our preliminary findings suggest a general lack of Deep interaction with AI during the writing process. We believe that the outcomes can lead to better task and tool design in the future for learners to develop deep, critical thinking when interacting with AI.

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Joint World Bank, UN Report Assesses Damage to Gaza’s Infrastructure

Damages to Physical Structures Estimated at $18.5 billion as of end January

WASHINGTON, April 2, 2024  – The cost of damage to critical infrastructure in Gaza is estimated at around $18.5 billion according to a new report released today by the World Bank and the United Nations, with financial support of the European Union. That is equivalent to 97% of the combined GDP of the West Bank and Gaza in 2022.

The Interim Damage Assessment report used remote data collection sources to measure damage to physical infrastructure in critical sectors incurred between October 2023 and end of January 2024. The report finds that damage to structures affects every sector of the economy. Housing accounts for 72% of the costs. Public service infrastructure such as water, health and education account for 19%, and damages to commercial and industrial buildings account for 9%. For several sectors, the rate of damage appears to be leveling off as few assets remain intact. An estimated 26 million tons of debris and rubble have been left in the wake of the destruction, an amount that is estimated to take years to remove.

The report also looks at the impact on the people of Gaza. More than half the population of Gaza is on the brink of famine and the entire population is experiencing acute food insecurity and malnutrition. Over a million people are without homes and 75% of the population is displaced. Catastrophic cumulative impacts on physical and mental health have hit women, children, the elderly, and persons with disabilities the hardest, with the youngest children anticipated to be facing life-long consequences to their development.

With 84% of health facilities damaged or destroyed, and a lack of electricity and water to operate remaining facilities, the population has minimal access to health care, medicine, or life-saving treatments. The water and sanitation system has nearly collapsed, delivering less than 5% of its previous output, with people dependent on limited water rations for survival. The education system has collapsed, with 100% of children out of school.

The report also points to the impact on power networks as well as solar generated systems and the almost total power blackout since the first week of the conflict. With 92% of primary roads destroyed or damaged and the communications infrastructure seriously impaired, the delivery of basic humanitarian aid to people has become very difficult.

The Interim Damage Assessment Note identifies key actions for early recovery efforts, starting with an increase in humanitarian assistance, food aid and food production; the provision of shelter and rapid, cost-effective, and scalable housing solutions for displaced people; and the resumption of essential services.

About the Gaza Interim Damage Assessment Report

The Gaza Interim Damage Assessment report draws on remote data collection sources and analytics to provide a preliminary estimate of damages to physical structures in Gaza from the conflict in accordance with the Rapid Damage & Needs Assessment (RDNA) methodology. RDNAs follow a globally recognized methodology that has been applied in multiple post-disaster and post-conflict settings. A comprehensive RDNA that assesses economic and social losses, as well as financing needs for recovery and reconstruction, will be completed as soon as the situation allows. The cost of damages, losses and needs estimated through a comprehensive RDNA is expected to be significantly higher than that of an Interim Damage Assessment.

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