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The Development and Validation of a Critical Thinking Skills Inventory: RASCH and Confirmatory Factor Analysis Approaches
28 Pages Posted: 10 Apr 2020 Publication Status: Preprint
Abstract
The purpose of this study is to develop and validate a critical thinking skills inventory (CTSI) for post-secondary polytechnic students in Singapore taking a general module on critical thinking and problem solving. The initial CTSI was developed based on a critical thinking framework and consisted of 25 items categorised into these four investigated subskills: (1) Interpretation, (2) Analysis, (3) Evaluation and (4) Inference. Non-experimental cross-sectional design using a survey was comprehensively implemented in this study, conducted in two phases, i.e. pilot testing and main study, with 1727 and 723 sample participants respectively. After undergoing reliability and validity examinations (employing Rasch and confirmatory factor analyses), the final 19-item CTSI demonstrated good psychometric properties to assess critical thinking skills.
Keywords: Scale validation, Critical thinking skills, Rasch analysis, Confirmatory factor analysis, Post-secondary students
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