Diagnosing the attainment of basic enquiry skills: the 100-year old quest for critical thinking

Abstract

The development of critical thinking has been regarded as one of the most essential objectives of science education for more than 100 years. Evidence for the provision of opportunity to acquire such intellectual skills has been rare and research data not encouraging. We shall describe here two novel approaches to testing for selected enquiry skills, such as the application of simple sampling rules. The first approach, the TAMT test, uses a multiple-choice format plus reasons-for-choice, and was used in Austria, West Germany, Israel, and the Philippines. The second, the Analysis of Scientific Passages Test (ASPT), is open-ended and permits the categorization of responses; it was used in Israel and the US. Spontaneous attention to the logical structure of passages in both tests was very low in both the secondary and the tertiary test-populations. 'Prompted' attention was higher, but still not satisfac-tory. Subjects could be classified into spontaneous, latent (i.e. only after prompting), and non-users of these skills. Implications for teachers and teacher-educators are patent, since the lack of conceptual development in this domain, and the lack of habit-formation to attend spontaneously to the logical structure of situations would perpetuate a vicious circle of underdeveloped critical thinking.