Li Suqi, Tang Shenyu, Geng Xingyu, Liu Qi
School of Education Science, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, China.
Front Psychol. 2022 Nov 25;13:1017885. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1017885. eCollection 2022.
Education for sustainable development (ESD) has focused on the promotion of sustainable thinking skills, capacities, or abilities for learners of different educational stages. Critical thinking (CT) plays an important role in the lifelong development of college students, which is also one of the key competencies in ESD. The development of a valuable framework for assessing college students' CT is important for understanding their level of CT. Therefore, this study aimed to construct a reliable self-evaluation CT framework for college students majoring in the humanities.
Exploratory factor analysis (EFA), confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), and Item analysis were conducted to explore the reliability and validity of the CT evaluation framework. Six hundred and forty-two college students majoring in the humanities were collected. The sample was randomly divided into two subsamples (1 = 321, 2 = 321).
The Cronbach's alpha coefficient for the whole scale was 0.909, and the values of the Cronbach's alpha coefficients for individual factors of the scale ranged from 0.724 to 0.878. Then CFA was conducted within the scope of the validity study of the scale. In this way, the structure of the 7-factor scale was confirmed. Results indicated that the constructed evaluation framework performed consistently with the collected data. CFA also confirmed a good model fitting of the relevant 22 factors of the college students' CT framework ( = 3.110, RMSEA = 0.056, GFI = 0.927, AGFI = 0.902, NFI = 0.923, and CFI = 0.946).
These findings revealed that the CT abilities self-evaluation scale was a valid and reliable instrument for measuring the CT abilities of college students in the humanities. Therefore, the college students' CT self-evaluation framework included three dimensions: discipline cognition (DC), CT disposition, and CT skills. Among them, CT disposition consisted of motivation (MO), attention (AT), and open-mindedness (OM), while CT skills included clarification skills (CS), organization skills (OS), and reflection (RE). Therefore, this framework can be an effective instrument to support college students' CT measurement. Consequently, some suggestions are also put forward regarding how to apply the instrument in future studies.
可持续发展教育（ESD）专注于提升不同教育阶段学习者的可持续思维技能、能力。批判性思维（CT）在大学生的终身发展中起着重要作用，也是ESD的关键能力之一。构建一个有价值的框架来评估大学生的批判性思维，对于了解他们的批判性思维水平很重要。因此，本研究旨在为人文专业大学生构建一个可靠的批判性思维自我评价框架。
进行探索性因素分析（EFA）、验证性因素分析（CFA）和项目分析，以探究批判性思维评估框架的信效度。收集了642名人文专业大学生的数据。样本被随机分为两个子样本（1组 = 321人，2组 = 321人）。
整个量表的克朗巴哈系数为0.909，量表各单个因素的克朗巴哈系数值在0.724至0.878之间。然后在量表效度研究范围内进行CFA。通过这种方式，确认了七因素量表的结构。结果表明，构建的评估框架与收集到的数据表现一致。CFA还证实了大学生批判性思维框架相关的22个因素具有良好的模型拟合度（χ² = 3.110，RMSEA = 0.056，GFI = 0.927，AGFI = 0.902，NFI = 0.923，CFI = 0.946）。
这些结果表明，批判性思维能力自我评价量表是测量人文专业大学生批判性思维能力的有效且可靠的工具。因此，大学生批判性思维自我评价框架包括三个维度：学科认知（DC）、批判性思维倾向和批判性思维技能。其中，批判性思维倾向包括动机（MO）、注意力（AT）和开放性思维（OM），而批判性思维技能包括澄清技能（CS）、组织技能（OS）和反思（RE）。因此，该框架可以成为支持大学生批判性思维测量的有效工具。因此，还就如何在未来研究中应用该工具提出了一些建议。
