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Summary of Robert H. Ennis’s,
“Nationwide Testing of Critical Thinking for Higher Education: Vigilance Required”
Dona Warren
The Spellings Commission, in its report "A Test of Leadership: Charting the Future of
U.S. Higher Education," recommended
ƒ that institutions of higher education administer critical-thinking tests to their students
at the beginning of their freshmen and at the end of their senior year in order to
establish the “value added” of post-secondary education.
ƒ that the results of these tests be made available to the public in order to enable
parents and students to compare and choose between institutions of higher learning.
Ennis has identified the following problems with these recommendations:
ƒ Comparability would require all institutions to use a single exam, or to choose one of
a small number of comparable exams.
ƒ Comparisons between institutions will tempt colleges to manipulate their test scores
by adjusting their admissions criteria or by selecting certain students for testing.
ƒ The “ceilings and floors” intrinsic to any test will make any particular critical thinking
exam or any set of comparable exams inappropriate for institutions with student
bodies that tend to lie below the floor or above the ceiling of the exam, and this will
make the “value added” of these institutions invisible.
ƒ Without a control group, any improvement of mean test scores will be difficult to
attribute to the formal educational process due to the possibility of alternative
explanations such as maturation, extra-institutional learning, the incomparability of
the populations given the test within a single institution (e.g. the inclusion of scores
from students who will later drop out may lower the mean freshman score).
ƒ Any critical thinking exam is based upon some model of critical thinking. Informed
selection of a critical thinking exam must therefore be guided by 1) informed
selection of a critical thinking model and 2) review of the evidence for the validity of
the exam, given that model. There is no guarantee (and some reason to doubt) that
the selection of a nationwide critical thinking exam will be guided by either
consideration.
Ennis has identified the following reasons in favor of partial and vigilant cooperation with
the Spellings Commission’s recommendations
ƒ In an “assessment driven” education environment, cooperation with the
recommendation is likely to raise the profile of critical thinking on college campuses.
ƒ If properly undertaken, assessment will prevent courses and programs that do not
promote critical thinking from successfully claiming that they do.
This partial and vigilant cooperation would arguably include
ƒ resistance to the mandated use of a particular critical thinking test, and to the
mandated choice of one of a limited number of approved critical thinking tests
ƒ transparency regarding both the conception of critical thinking that grounds the test
selected by an institution and the arguments for the validity of that exam.
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References
Ennis, Robert H., “Nationwide Testing of Critical Thinking for Higher Education:
Vigilance Required,” revised version of a paper presented at a session sponsored
by the Association for Informal Logic and Critical Thinking and the American
Philosophical Association Committee on the Teaching of Philosophy on
Thursday, 19 April 2007 at the APA Central Division meeting, 2007.
http://ailact.mcmaster.ca/papers.htm.
U. S. Department of Education, A test of leadership: Charting the future of U. S. higher
education (A report of the Commission appointed by Secretary of Education
Margaret Spellings). Washington, D. C.: U. S. Government Printing Office, 2006.
http://www.ed.gov/about/bdscomm/list/hiedfuture/index.html
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Test of Suggested AILACT Resolution
Whereas:
1) The Spellings Commission recommends testing for critical-thinking in higher education
institutions in order to see the “value added” so that the public can tell whether it is getting its
money's worth, and so that parents, students, and policy-makers can numerically compare
institutions; using the transparent results of this testing, which are to be collected and made
available by the United States Education Department;
2) Commission-inspired transparent critical thinking testing can be expected to produce:
a) attention to critical thinking in individual courses and in the total curriculum;
b) a check on whether critical thinking in the everyday sense (the epistemic sense) is
being taught;
c) a check on the effectiveness of critical thinking instruction; and
d) helpful information for prospective students and parents about an institution's
effectiveness in promoting critical thinking;
3) Although the Commission did not explicitly recommend a single nationwide required critical
thinking test, its insistence on numerical comparability of institutions exerts strong pressure in
that direction;
4) A single nationwide required critical thinking test would have overwhelming political and
economic problems; and
5) There are various other significant problems and dangers in the implementation of the
Commission’s recommendations.
Therefore, be it resolved that:
1) The Association for Informal Logic and Critical Thinking (AILACT) recommends
cooperation with the Commission's recommendations for the most part, but also recommends
strong opposition to having one nationwide standardized critical-thinking test, although it
realizes that a variety of assessment procedures will result in less comparability than is desired
by the Commission;
2) AILACT recommends more transparency than the Commission requests, in the form of open
availability of a) the critical-thinking conception employed, b) outdated or comparable forms of
the test used, and c) the argument for the claimed extent of situational validity of the test; and
3) AILACT recommends that its members and other endorsers of critical thinking be vigilant in
monitoring the extent to which various problems and dangers occur in testing for the “value
added” by higher education institutions to students’ critical thinking, and take appropriate action
when they do occur; and
4) The above recommendation for cooperation holds only to the extent that the problems and
dangers are well handled.
Association for Informal Logic and Critical Thinking
http://ailact.mcmaster.ca/