Critical thinking is an act of evaluating things to make a good decision. Lack in enough critical thinking skills will result in poor judgment. This poor judgment will make you suffer from many difficulties (Sternberg and Halpern, 2020). Different sets of definitions show different requirements of critical thinking skills. Given below are some definitions to clear your concept about critical thinking;
Critical thinking is a cognitive process of arranging things in a well-organised way.
Critical thinking is the act of forming a connection between your ideas, and facts/ theories.
Critical thinking allows you to extract results by seeing both bright and dark sides of the fact. It also gives you a platform to test things. Especially through your own perception.
Additionally, the abilities of a person to test, interpret, and analyse facts are critical thinking skills. Thus, critical thinking is not only necessary in research writing. It is very important in everyday life challenges as well. Nowadays, all educational institutes are paying attention to critical skill development amongst students. But unfortunately, the assessment of how much students acquire critical thinking skills is not common. Hence, to measure students’ critical thinking abilities, psychologists proposed ‘Critical thinking assessment tests’. In other words, the critical thinking tests are ‘Critical reasoning tests’.
Critical Thinking Assessment Tests in Cognitive Psychology
Critical thinking assessment tests aim to measure the following things;
- How will you react in a difficult situation?
- At what level can you make assumptions?
- Do you have the necessary qualities to make an effective hypothesis?
- How can you test facts to support your arguments?
- How much time will you take to solve a critical problem?
- Your critical thinking assessment tests scores will show your intellectual level.
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How Do Different Critical Thinking Test Questions Investigate Different Cognitive Abilities?
The assumptions are thoughts that people often take for granted. An assumption doesn’t have to always be correct. But often, people get confused and make the wrong assumptions. Hence, assumptions are key aspects of a critical thinking test. The critical thinking tests include a situation in the form of a question. And several assumptions related to the situation are shown in the form of MCQs. From many assumptions, the student has to measure whether a specific assumption meets the criteria or not.
Deduction is another important cognitive skill. It can help a person access different situations. In other words, deduction is an act of extracting a conclusion from the given information. This critical thinking skill is useful for a person in terms of testing things. This can be done at a single glance. In critical assessment tests, there are some questions to measure these deductive skills. In some tests, there is a long passage containing all the necessary information. But your task is to draw a useful conclusion from the given passage. In this way, these tests check the cognitive abilities of a person.
The most important critical thinking skill is the ability to build the right perception about different things. Thus, the few questions in a critical thinking test contain some information with a proposed conclusion. And your task is to give answers to ‘Why, Who, and How’. In other words, you have to write what you think about the information. For example, is the conclusion of the passage logical or not? And is there any flaw within the passage? Hence, good interpretation skills will save you from poor judgments. These apply to all fields of life.
The critical thinking tests also contain questions to test whether you are competent enough to share your arguments or not. Such argumentative skills are important for defending yourself. Argumentative talks are not only the job of lawyers. But they also help whenever you need to defend your work. Taking for example the final Thesis defence. The argumentative questions in critical thinking tests aim to show abilities. These help differentiate between strong and weak statements. A strong argument targets all the facts that the tutor asked within a question. But a weak argument fails to highlight the main problem. Hence, developing arguments related to the topic is also important. Because it is a means for accessing critical thinking skills.
Different Psychometric Tests
Psychometric tests are the tests that psychologists use to measure cognitive abilities. Our educational system has introduced many tests to measure such abilities. Some common psychometric tests are given as follows;
- Formative and summative tests
- Analytical Reasoning Tests
- Fair-mindset Tests
- Critical writing abilities Tests
- General amplitude Assessment Test
- Graduate Record Evaluation Tests
- Watson Glaser Critical Thinking Tests
Watson Glaser Critical Thinking Test
All tests have common criteria to check the critical thinking skills of a student. But in this article, we will discuss how Watson Glaser Critical Thinking Test will check such critical thinking aspects.
Watson Glaser’s critical thinking test is a common method to check the aptitude of different job candidates. It is a way to test the critical thinking skills of a person (especially lawyers) before hiring them. There are many critical assessment tests available. But psychologists designed the Watson Glaser Critical Thinking test to gauge the potential of lawyers. This test asks questions from lawyers to explore the following things;
- How much time will they take to assess the situation critically?
- How competent is a lawyer in drawing practical consequences from a scenario?
- Are they capable of developing strong arguments or not?
- How competent are they in making an assumption?
- How much time will they take to interpret the complexity of a case?
Watson Glaser Critical Thinking Test (WGCT-Test) Pattern:
The Watson Glaser test questions contain forty questions divided into five sections. Each section contains eight MCQs. And each section targets five of the above mentioned categories. The total time limit to check quickness of the candidate is 30 minutes.
Like WGCT-test, all other tests have specific criteria. We can highlight them as follows;
- Weightage of five evaluation schemes.
- Available time to solve each question.
- Format of questions (MCQs, comprehension, and open-ended answers).