Research On Higher Order Thinking Skills Assessment

Higher order thinking skills currently are the hotspot of international education research,which is vital to individual happiness,national creativity and social development.With the cultivation of students' higher order thinking skills paid special attention by governments all over the world,higher order thinking skills become a crucial part of students' key competency in many countries.However,the cultivation of higher order thinking skills is still a vague field in teaching practice.The reason behind this phenomenon mainly lies in the lack of a clear definition of higher order thinking,consensus to ability components of higher order thinking,assessment tools of higher order thinking skills and in-depth methods of data analysis.Therefore,a better guidance of teaching practice in elementary and secondary schools and professional support of curriculum teaching reform both entail further exploration of what higher order thinking is,what its components are,how to build its assessment framework and how to develop relative data analysis methods.Chapter 1 functions as the introduction of this study.It concentrates on the literature review of the concept and assessment of higher order thinking,which illustrates the necessity of further exploration to higher order thinking.Based on this,the research problem is set in detail and the basic logic of this study is explained.That is,this study will explore the connotation,components,assessment framework,assessment technology and cases of higher order thinking in sequence.Chapter 2 explores the connotation of higher order thinking.Based on the definition of relative concepts and by means of literature review,the historical origin of higher order thinking is organized and illustrated,and the connotation of higher order thinking is systematically analyzed from the perspectives of philosophy,psychology and education.This chapter constructs the structure of high order thinking and makes clear that higher order thinking mainly consists of thinking skills and thinking dispositions.In addition,domain knowledge and methodological knowledge are the basis of the operation of higher order thinking and task situations serve as the conditions for the occurrence of higher order thinking.Chapter 3 develops the assessment framework of higher order thinking skills.After the comparison of different components,this study decides to employ Bloom's taxonomy of educational objectives as the basis of the skills components construction of higher order thinking.Questionnaire survey and interview are conducted among 61 experts and 486 educators,who are all carefully selected so as to refine the components of higher order thinking skills.And the results are “Understand”(Summarizing,Inferring,Comparing,Explaining),“Apply”(Implementing,Decision making),“Analyze”“Evaluate”“Create”.In addition,it also explores the assessment framework of higher order thinking skills.The dissertation chooses some typical subjects and analyzes their nature to construct the assessment frameworks of higher order thinking skills in the context of different subjects with both inductive and deductive methods.It is found that the assessment framework of science mainly contains “explaining phenomenon scientifically”,“evaluating and designing scientific investigations and experiments” and “interpreting data and evidence scientifically”;the assessment framework of reading mainly contains “integrating and explaining” and “criticizing and appraising”;the assessment framework of history mainly contains “forming historical explanation”,“generating historical inference”,“making historical appraisal” and “putting forward historical opinions”.Chapter 4 explores the assessment technology of higher order thinking skills.First,the makes it explicit that the guidance theory over the assessment technology of high order thinking skills is still classic test theory and item response theory,which provides specific solution to handle task design and data analysis.Especially the test tool development and four-cornerstone model(consisting of construct maps,items design,outcome space and measurement model)under item response theory,play a important role in the guidance of the test of tool development.After a systematic analysis and summary of the existing education quality assessments at home and abroad,the process of developing the assessment tool of higher order thinking skills is constructed and nine strategies of assessment tasks development of higher order thinking skills are formed.Besides,the dissertation explores the scoring of high order thinking skills assessment and makes clear its procedures and standard.Chapter 5 is about the case study of higher order thinking skills assessment,which is exemplified by science discipline in junior high school.Following the process and quality standard of the assessment tools development,the dissertation devises assessment tool of higher order thinking skills in the context of science.Analysis of student test data shows that the Cronbach's alpha coefficient of the evaluation tool is 0.76.The Kappa coefficient of the scorers on all items exceeds 0.9,and the WEIGHTED FIT of the 18 questions is all within 0.9-1.1.In addition,the CMIN/DF of the evaluation tool is 7.159,the NFI is 0.969,the RFI is 0.964,the IFI is 0.973,the TLI is 0.969,the CFI is 0.973,and the RMSEA is 0.016.The evaluation tool is of high quality.It uses the method of multistage stratified sampling to conduct research on grade 8 students in city S and finally tests on 4465 students selected from 60 schools of 4 districts.Hierarchical linear model is used to analyze the influence upon students' higher order thinking skills in the context of science from both levels of individual student and of schools as a whole.Meanwhile,regression analysis and structural equation model are employed to explore the mediating effect of learning confidence when the influence of teacher-student relationship upon the development of students' higher order thinking skills is discussed.There are mainly three results: first,city S students score 48.6 out of 100 on average,with a standard deviation of 16.4;second,students' higher order thinking skills is significantly influenced by students' extracurricular reading,learning strategy,learning emotion and socio-economic status of students' family;third,higher order thinking skills of school students in the context of science is significantly influenced by the nature of school,teachers' teaching methods,school atmosphere,school teaching management and so forth.Chapter 6,based on the analysis of the above research results,the dissertation presents some related advice.First,the connotation and skills components of higher order thinking should be clearly recognized;second,the assessment of higher order thinking skills should be properly designed;third,the assessment mechanism should be positively explored;forth,the cultivation level of students' higher order thinking skills should be effectively improved.Besides,the dissertation points out the limitation of the research and indicates that diagnosing and assessing higher order thinking skills on the basis of network interaction may be the direction of future development.