Measuring critical thinking, intelligence and academic performance in psychology undergraduates

Liam O'Hare*, Carol McGuinness

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

22 Citations (Scopus)
153 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

The paper explores the factorial relationship between measures of critical thinking skills, non-verbal intelligence, and academic performance (A-levels and undergraduate degree marks). One hundred and twenty-nine undergraduate psychology students (94 first years and 35 third years) participated by completing two subscales of the California Critical Thinking Skills Test (CCTST) and Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices Set 1 (APM-S1); they also provided information on their A-level points and degree marks. An exploratory factor analysis grouped the CCTST subscales of evaluation and inference with the APM-S1. The resultant factor was named 'Reasoning skills', and the A-levels and degree marks formed a second factor named 'Academic knowledge'. Furthermore, third years scored significantly higher than first years on the CCTST evaluation subscale (effect size d = 0.56), and there was a moderate effect size difference between their CCTST inference subscale scores (effect size d = 0.31) but only small effect size differences between the two groups on academic performance (d = 0.16) and APM-S1 scores (d = 0.04). It was provisionally concluded that critical thinking changes over the course of a degree and that these abilities are not well captured by traditional academic assessments. The implications of this for teaching and learning in higher education are briefly considered.


Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)123-131
Number of pages9
JournalThe Irish Journal of Psychology
Volume30
Issue number3-4
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2009

Keywords

  • measuring critical thinking
  • measuring intelligence
  • measuring academic performance
  • psychology undergraduates

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