The importance of developing and assessing student critical thinking at university can be seen through its inclusion as a graduate attribute for universities and from research highlighting the value employers, educators and students place on demonstrating critical thinking skills. Critical thinking skills are seldom explicitly assessed at universities. Commercial critical thinking assessments, which are often generic in context, are available. However, literature suggests that assessments that use a context relevant to the students more accurately reflect their critical thinking skills. This paper describes the development and evaluation of a chemistry critical thinking test (the Danczak–Overton–Thompson Chemistry Critical Thinking Test or DOT test), set in a chemistry context, and designed to be administered to undergraduate chemistry students at any level of study. Development and evaluation occurred over three versions of the DOT test through a variety of quantitative and qualitative reliability and validity testing phases. The studies suggest that the final version of the DOT test has good internal reliability, strong test–retest reliability, moderate convergent validity relative to a commercially available test and is independent of previous academic achievement and university of study. Criterion validity testing revealed that third year students performed statistically significantly better on the DOT test relative to first year students, and postgraduates and academics performed statistically significantly better than third year students. The statistical and qualitative analysis indicates that the DOT test is a suitable instrument for the chemistry education community to use to measure the development of undergraduate chemistry students’ critical thinking skills.

中文翻译：

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开发和验证一种用于测量化学专业学生批判性思维能力的工具

在大学中发展和评估学生批判性思维的重要性可以通过将其纳入大学的研究生属性以及突出强调雇主，教育者和学生在展示批判性思维技能方面的价值的研究中看出。在大学中，很少明确评估批判性思维技能。商业批判性思维评估通常在上下文中是通用的。但是，文献表明，使用与学生相关的情境的评估更准确地反映了他们的批判性思维能力。本文介绍了在化学背景下进行的化学批判性思维测试（Danczak–Overton–Thompson化学批判性思维测试或DOT测试）的开发和评估，并设计为可对任何学习水平的化学专业的本科生进行管理。通过各种定量和定性的可靠性和有效性测试阶段，对DOT测试的三个版本进行了开发和评估。研究表明，相对于市售测试，DOT测试的最终版本具有良好的内部可靠性，强的重试可靠性，适度的收敛效度，并且与先前的学术成就和学习大学无关。标准有效性测试显示，DOT考试的三年级学生的成绩相对于一年级的学生要好得多，而研究生和学者的成绩在统计上要比三年级的学生好得多。