Student Performance on the California Critical Thinking Skills Test
Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTION Assessment of learning goals and effectiveness of instruction are explicit obligations of modern academic programs. Many programs include critical thinking as a key learning goal. The California Critical Thinking Skills Test (CCTST) is a national exam used to exam critical thinking skills and serves as a predictor for future job-related performance. Unlike most traditional standardized test, the CCTST does not measure general knowledge, but more specifically how that knowledge can be applied and interpreted. There is a limited amount of research on CCTST scores (Whitten & Brahmasrene, 2009). The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the determinants of student performance on the CCTST exam. Model variables include controls for ability, demographics, major, and taking multiple courses in the online environment. The research cohort for this study is a public university located in the Southwestern part of the United States. The institution is mid-sized with a total enrollment of approximately 8,000 total students at a public institution. The organization of the manuscript is as follows: First, a brief literature review is put forth. The second section of the manuscript describes the data and model. The next section offers empirical results for the determinants of performance on the CCTST exam. The final section offers conclusions and discusses the limitations of the study. LITERATURE REVIEW Facione (1990) wrote a manual, The Delphi Report, which summarized the concept of critical thinking. This concept was pieced together and announced by a panel of experts from the United States and Canada. They concluded that critical thinking is characterized as the process of purposeful, self-regulatory judgment. Critical Thinking, so defined, is the cognitive engine, which drives problem solving and decision-making. Standardized tests are a concrete way to measure student performance across a large number of institutions. The design of the CCTST aims to assess different levels of critical thinking and predict future job performance. The California Critical Thinking Skills Test family of exams is comprised of a total of nine tests that all measure critical thinking, but are applied in different academic and work related fields. The modifications to the CCTST over the last twenty years has been aimed at making sure the testing instrument meets validity and reliably traits (Khalili & Hossein, 2003). According to Bycio and Allen (2007), standardized tests provide a fair assessment of learned knowledge that does not merely assess whether a curriculum is being taught, but rather that the curriculum is being learned and understood. Many educators have had proven success in their classrooms with critical thinking exercises. However, the problems that most institutions of higher learning face are that very few teachers are able to post and compare successful teaching techniques with that of other institutions because the information is not always publicly available. A copious amount of research exist relating to student performance on standardized tests but a dearth of research over the California Critical Thinking Skills Test (CCTST). Whitten and Brahmasrene (2009) study offer one of the only studies focusing on critical thinking skills. In their study focusing on students in an introductory accounting course, they find the high school rank and college classification to be the only significant determinants. The research track that most closely relates to the CCTST is information focusing on the determinants of student performance on the Educational Testing Service's (ETS) field exam. Mirchandani, Lynch, and Hamilton (2001) find that two types of variables are related to student performance on the ETS exam: input variables (SAT scores, transfer GPA, and gender) and process variables (grades in quantitative courses). They conclude that the SAT score is a dominant variable explaining most of the variation in ETS exam scores, although other variables including GPA and gender are also statistically significant. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".