One of the three major goals for the FYI program is to help students improve their critical thinking skills.

For the past three years, we have been using the "two-essay exercise" as a way of assessing whether students' critical thinking skills have improved. This method has yielded some positive results:
1. We have seen that more students make noticeable progress than not.
2. Faculty discussions about what is critical thinking and what are good essay questions to give students practice in doing it have helped faculty to focus on critical thinking in their classes.
As result, the FYI faculty has reached consensus that critical thinking means reaching a reasoned judgment, not an opinion or unsupported speculation, grounded in the academic content of the course.

Last Spring, we began a change to our assessment procedure for critical thinking. The new procedure has several steps.
PLEASE take each step on time.

Step 1. Course Objectives
Your syllabus will contain a list of course objectives. Please include in this list:
"Students will learn to move from learning facts to making critically reasoned judgments grounded in the academic content of the course.
(Note: By "objective" we are meaning a goal that the faculty member
is trying to have the students achieve.)

Step 2. Student Outcomes
Your syllabus will also contain a list of student outcomes--a list of things the students demonstrate that they can do. Please include on this list one or more outcomes related to critical thinking. The statement of this outcome should fit the nature of your course. While all FYI courses will list the same critical thinking objective, the statement of outcomes will be specific to each course. Here are some examples:
"Students will demonstrate the ability to find evidence to support a position and to evaluate its validity. Or, "Students will demonstrate the ability to make evident the validity of a statement by analyzing the assumptions on which it is based and the concepts in which it is stated."

If you wish to review Bloom's Taxonomy, it is available on the FYI Website :
http://www.ncsu.edu/firstyearinquiry/
Click on "Resources" button.

Step 3. Assign a task.
Included in the syllabus will be a task that will give students the opportunity to demonstrate the skill you have identified as a student outcome for the course. Your evaluation of this task should enable you to determine for each student and for the class as a whole the extent to which the desired outcome has been achieved. This task would appropriately be done near the end of the semester. Make it clear in your assignment the kinds of things you will look for in a student's work to tell you whether and how well he or she has achieved the outcome. Many faculty are developing their own grading rubrics, in which they describe for students the features of an A paper, a B paper, and so on. We strongly recommend that you consider doing this for your students and yourself. A useful source is the Assessment rubrics section of: http://www2.acs.ncsu.edu/UPA/assmt/index.html

Step 4. Course Assessment , Student Questionnaire (see timetable below) , Faculty Reflection (see timetable below) .
At the end of the course, after you have completed the grading, write up what you have learned about your course in steps 1, 2 and 3 from the experience of defining objectives, outcomes, and assessment methods, and from the assessment results. From the standpoint of this particular objective, outcome and assessment, what aspects of the course are working well? How do you know? What aspects should be changed or strengthened? Why? How? What was your grading distribution, that is how many students made an "A", a "B", a "C", a "D" or an F" on the assignment you created for this assessment?

For help in doing steps 1, 2 and 3, I recommend you consult
http://www.ncsu.edu/undergrad_affairs/assessment/files/ger/guide.htm

This page describes steps involved in assessing General Education Outcomes, and while it does not take up critical thinking explicitly, it does a good job of describing the process that I have given in shorthand above.

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