Why Critical Thinking Will Never Be on the Test
Critical thinking is one of the Great White Whales of education. Every new education reform promises to foster it, and every new generation of Big Standardized Tests promises to measure it.
Everybody working in education has some idea of what it is, and yet it can be hard to put into a few words. There are entire websites devoted to it, and organizations and foundations dedicated to it. Here, for example, is the website of the Foundation for Critical Thinking. They've got a definition of critical thinking from the 1987 National Council for Excellence in Critical Thinking that goes on for five paragraphs. One of the shortest definitions I can pull out of their site is this one:
The intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action.
Bottom line -- critical thinking is complicated.
So, can we believe test manufacturers when they say that their test measures critical thinking skills? Can a series of questions that can be delivered and scored on a national scale be designed that would actually measure the critical thinking skills of the test takers?
I think the obstacles to creating such a standardized test are huge. Here are the hurdles that test manufacturers would have to leap.
Critical thinking takes time.
Certainly, there are people who can make rapid leaps to a conclusion, who can see patterns and structure of ideas quickly and clearly (though we could argue that's more intuitive thinking than critical thinking, but then, intuition might just be critical thinking that runs below the level of clear consciousness, so, again, complicated). But mostly the kind of analyses and evaluation that we associate with critical thinking takes time.
There's a reason that English teachers rarely give the assignment, "The instant you finish reading the last page of the assigned novel, immediately start writing the assigned paper and complete it within a half hour." Critical thinking is most often applied to complex constructions, and for most people it takes a while to examine, reflect, re-examine and pull apart the pieces of the matter.
If you are asking a question that must be answered right now, this second, you are at the very best asking a question that measures how quickly the student can critically think -- but you're probably not measuring critical thinking at all.
Critical thinking takes place in a personal context.
We do not do our critical thinking in a vacuum. We are all standing in a particular Why Critical Thinking Will Never Be on the Test | Peter Greene:
