Does Higher Education Teach Students to Think Critically?
There is a discernible and growing gap between the qualifications that a university degree certifies and the actual generic, 21st-century skills with which students graduate from higher education. By generic skills, it is meant literacy and critical thinking skills encompassing problem solving, analytic reasoning and communications competency. As automation takes over non- and lower-cognitive tasks in today’s workplace, these generic skills are especially valued but a tertiary degree is a poor indicator of skills level. In the United States, the Council for Aid for Education developed an assessment of generic skills called the CLA+ and carried out testing in six countries between 2016 and 2021. This book provides the data and analysis of this “CLA+ International Initiative”.
Ensuring cross-cultural reliability and validity
The purpose of this chapter is to present a reliability and validity case study investigating the scoring of the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA+) of higher education students in Finland as well as the United States. This study contributes to the overall literature on establishing equivalency for an international assessment of students’ critical thinking and written communication skills. Two prior studies, similar in nature, both found that results from a translated and adapted performance-based assessment are comparable (">Zahner and Steedle, 2014[1]; Zahner and Ciolfi, 2018[2]). This chapter presents a third case using CLA+ across two languages and cultures.