One of the primary goals of higher education is to enhance students’ critical thinking skills as they work to complete their program of study. As such, it is for critical educators and academic program coordinators to have access to assessment tools that can provide accurate estimates of the cognitive and dispositional domains of higher-order thinking. Therefore, the current study was designed to provide evidence of the psychometric properties of the Critical Thinking Disposition Scale. Data were collected from 558 undergraduate and graduate students. Using exploratory structural equation modeling, we demonstrated that a 2-factor solution—consisting of critical openness and reflective skepticism dimensions—provided a good fit to the observed data. Additionally, our results showed critical openness and reflective skepticism scores were positively associated with conceptually related constructs (e.g., need for cognition and flexible thinking), demonstrating the convergent validity of the instrument. Our discussion concerns the potential utility of instrument for those interested in assessing critical thinking dispositions and avenues for future research.

高等教育的主要目标之一是在学生完成学习计划时提高他们的批判性思维能力。这样一来，关键的教育者和学术计划协调员就可以使用评估工具，这些工具可以提供对高阶思维的认知和处置领域的准确估计。因此，本研究旨在为批判性思维倾向量表的心理计量学特性提供证据。数据收集自558名本科生和研究生。使用探索性结构方程模型，我们证明了由关键开放度和反思性怀疑维度组成的2因子解决方案非常适合观察到的数据。另外，我们的结果表明，严格的开放性和反思性怀疑评分与概念上相关的构造（例如，需要认知和灵活的思维）呈正相关，表明了该工具的收敛有效性。我们的讨论关系到那些有兴趣评估批判性思维倾向和未来研究途径的人的工具的潜在实用性。