The Validity Of Assessing Critical Thinking Skills In An Achievement Test For First-Year English Majors

Achievement tests,as a measure to evaluate how much progress students have attained in terms of the goals of learning at a certain of a course of study,are the most frequently used method of assessment and take up the highest proportion in students’ total results.The result of achievement tests often provides information of the effect of the teaching and learning as well as what the students and teachers should do for the following stage.Therefore,the quality of an achievement test can greatly influence the teaching and learning of a course.Critical thinking is a kind of skill the development of the society requires,a trait the educational reform emphasizes and one of the goals the syllabus includes.Against the background of educational reform,the Intensive Reading course plays an important role in cultivating students’ CT skills.As an achievement test ofthe course,students’ CT skills are supposed to be assessed apart from the basic language abilities.To know how well a test assesses the abilities/skills it claims to assess,the construct validity of the test should be studied.To know whether an achievement test of Intensive Reading course validly assessed students’ critical thinking skills,this study tries to explore the validity of assessing critical thinking skills in an achievement test for first-year English majors.The research question is:Are critical thinking skills validly assessed in the test?To validate the test,Bachman and Palmer’s Assessment Use Argument(AUA)framework was adopted as the theoretical framework for the validation.Based on the framework,this study adapted 7 warrants under the claim "the interpretations about the ability to be assessed are meaningful".To justify the 7 warrants,evidences from various sources are presented and analyzed.The result of the study shows:First,CT skills are assessed in the final test of IR course.Second,the test is partially valid in terms of assessing CT skills.From all the evidences from various sources,the results suggest that the definition of CT skills based on current theories and models of CT skills;the test items clearly specify the characteristics of the tasks so that the test takers’ performance of CT skills can be observed and elicited;the conditions in which the test is administered do NOT allow the test takers to perform at their highest level on CT skills;CT skills are engaged when the students finish the tasks of the final exam of IR;The scores in the test CANNOT be interpreted as indicators of students’ CT skills;the developers of the test did NOT communicate the definition of CT skills in clearly understandable language to test takers.The results implicate that the test should lessen its amount of test items;the assessment of evaluating skills should be attached importance to,etc.