A critical review of instruments for measuring critical thinking competencey of students

Critical thinking is a cognitive activity for understanding and evaluating findings and phenomena based on skills such as reasoning and analysis. In recent years, this skill has found a special status as an educational goal in the educational system of many countries in general education. Thus, understanding the methods of measuring this competence and examining the current instruments are crucial. This research aimed to introduce critical thinking skills tests of students as well as to identify and strengths and weaknesses of these tests via the critical review method and through the PRISMA model. After searching across Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar plus Iranian scientific databases including SID and Noormags between 2010 and 2022, 65 papers were retrieved with the keywords of “Critical thinking Skills test”, and “measuring students’ critical thinking”, and “Assessment of students' critical thinking”. From among the retrieved papers, five were chosen and investigated which were in line with the inclusion criteria including up-to-date documents, relevancy to the research aim, and investigation of psychometric properties of the instrument for the age group 7-18 years. Other studies were eliminated based on the exclusion criteria of the study. The analysis was done via a qualitative content analysis approach. The findings led to the identification of three types of tests including closed-response, open-response, and mixed for measuring critical thinking competence, which had similarities and differences from each other. Expectedly, to establish a suitable status for measuring this competence, novel instruments in line with the researcher’s aim would be selected and designed, followed by an investigation of psychometric properties of open-response and mixed instruments considering their accuracy in measuring critical thinking skills.