Development and Validation of a Critical Thinking Assessment-Scale Short Form

Abstract

This study presents and validates the psychometric characteristics of a short form of the Critical Thinking Self-assessment Scale (CTSAS). The original CTSAS was composed of six subscales representing the six components of Facione’s conceptualisation of critical thinking. The CTSAS short form kept the same structures and reduced the number of items from 115 in the original version, to 60. The CTSAS short form was tested with a sample of 531 higher education students from five countries (Germany, Greece, Lithuania, Romania, and Portugal) enrolled in different disciplinary fields (Business Informatics, Teacher Education, English as a Foreign Language, Business and Economics, and Veterinary Medicine). The confirmatory analysis was used to test the new instrument reliability, internal consistency, and construct validity. Both the models that hypothesized the six factors to be correlated and to tap into a second-order factor representing the complex concept of critical thinking, had acceptable fit to the data. The instrument showed strong internal consistency (α = 0.969) and strong positive correlations between skills and between the skills and the overall scale (p < 0.05). Despite the unbalanced sex distribution in the population (close to 75% females), the instrument retained its factorial structure invariance across sexes. Therefore, the new instrument shows adequate goodness of fit and retained stability and reliability, and is proposed as a valid and reliable means to evaluate and monitor critical thinking in university students.