Exploring the structure of the Watson–Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal: One scale or many subscales?

By Robert M. Bernard, Dai Zhang, Philip C. Abrami, Fiore Sicoly, Evgueni F Borokhovski, Michael A. Surkes. 2008

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Abstract Critical thinking (CT) has been of longstanding interest among scholars, educators, and others who are concerned with thinking skills. The Watson–Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal (WGCTA) is the oldest and among the most widely used and studied CT measure. It was constructed around five subscales (or CT skills): inference, recognition of assumptions, deduction, interpretation, and evaluation of arguments. This paper describes a two part analysis of the psychometric properties of the WGCTA, based on 13 sets of subscale inter-correlations and 60 sets of subscale means retrieved from published studies. We performed a meta-analysis on the inter-correlations of the10 combinations of subscales and found that all of the average correlations that resulted were significant, but that all but one was significantly heterogeneous. Subsequently, we conducted principal components analysis on 60 subscale means of two different versions of the WGCTA. Each produced a one-factor solution, accounting for 82.69% and 79.55% of the total variance, respectively. Together these two parts of this study suggest that the WGCTA should be viewed as a measure of general competency, and that the subscales should not be interpreted individually.

Subfields: Education

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/60597888db142149ab215e5c2780cf4ecac99fc5

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Citations in the corpus

Instructional Interventions Affecting Critical Thinking Skills and Dispositions: A Stage 1 Meta-Analysis (2008, methodology): “In a recent analysis, Bernard et al. (2008) explored the intercorrelational structure of the subscales of the WGCTA, performing a factor analysis of the means of 70 studies of two versions of the test, and found that the best interpretation of these versions is represented by the total score rather…”
Strategies for Teaching Students to Think Critically (2015, methodology): “In determining whether and how to synthesize evidence on specific aspects of CT, we built on the Bernard et al. (2008) study that factor-analyzed CT subscale weighted means from 60 data sets for the Watson–Glaser Critical Thinking”
Educating the Developing Mind: Towards an Overarching Paradigm (2011, background): “Critical thinkers exhibit open-mindedness, tolerance of ambiguity, and a skeptical, questioning attitude (Bernard et al. 2008).”
Assessing Critical Thinking in Higher Education: Current State and Directions for Next-Generation Assessment. Research Report. ETS RR-14-10. (2014, background): “Additionally, there was no clear evidence of distinct subscales, since a single-component scale was discovered from 60 published studies in a meta-analysis (Bernard et al., 2008).”
The role of metacognitive skills in developing critical thinking (2010, methodology): “In a metanalytic study conducted by Bernard et al. (2008), 13 different studies were used and the factors of the WGCTA were combined in pairs.”
A meta-analysis of blended learning and technology use in higher education: from the general to the applied (2014, background): “At one point, a limited factor analytical study was conducted (Bernard et al. 2008) to determine if the subscales of the Watson – Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal (See Watson and Glaser 1980) were empirically distinguishable from one another, or whether the test should be considered as a global…”