The Development Of A Measurement Tool For The Critical Thinking Of Junior High School Students And The Study Of Its Relationship With General Cognitive Ability

The ability to identify and digest information is especially important in the face of increasingly complex problem scenarios and decision-making needs.As a kind of high-order thinking ability,critical thinking can help individuals cope with and deal with the changing information needs.It is an essential ability for individuals,countries and society.Although the importance of critical thinking has been unanimously recognized by scholars and educators.Scholars in the fields of philosophy,education,and psychology have also tried their best to study critical thinking,but the study of critical thinking has been advancing.One of the reason is the lack of tools to effectively evaluate critical thinking of individuals.Poor assessment tools can not only hinder people's understanding of critical thinking,but also it difficult to evaluate the achievement of critical thinking cultivation.There are many critical thinking tools,but with defects like that,the concept of measurement is difficult to be unified,the test form is not good,the test materials are in doubt,the evaluation criteria are out of practice,and the evaluation of the thinking process is lacking.The second is the imbalance of the research objects.Most of the assessment tools are suitable for high school students and adults,and the lack of effective evaluation of adolescents hinders the understanding of the development of critical thinking.The third is the lack of knowing about the relationship between critical thinking and general cognitive abilities.There are few studies on the relationship between critical thinking and general cognitive ability.Understanding the relationship between critical thinking and general cognitive ability can provide a lot of help for the cultivation of critical thinking.It also helps us understand the real process of critical thinking and further explore its mechanism.This study aims to develop a critical thinking assessment tool for junior high school students and explore the relationship between critical thinking and general cognitive ability with junior high school subjects.In this study,the daily topics concerned by primary and secondary school students were selected by the interview method.Then the answers of students were collected and sorted through open-ended questions.Four test materials were published with the topics of the publication of test rankings,after-school tutoring classes,online social tools and online video course.Open-type questions and closed-type questions are used as measurement forms.Combined with the idea of overall evaluation and visualization of thinking processes,a scoring standard for appropriate measurement forms is developed.Through the repeated debugging of the pretest and the formal test,a critical thinking assessment tool for junior high school students was finally formed.The critical thinking assessment tool was tested in terms of content validity,structural validity,and reliability.Next,critical thinking assessment tools,two intelligence tests,and two working memory tasks were used to measure the critical thinking level and general cognitive ability of 141 junior high school students.Different components of working memory capacity and execution function are separated by Fixed-links modeling.The relationship between intelligence,working memory capacity,executive function and critical thinking is analyzed by structural equation model.Finally,the cognitive basis of critical thinking is further explored through a comprehensive analysis of the relationship between critical thinking intelligence,working memory capacity and executive function,.Four conclusions were summarized according results.First,the critical thinking assessment tool for junior high school students is a good assessment tool which meets the requirements of psychometrics.Second,the intelligence level of junior high school students can effectively predict their critical thinking.Third,the working memory capacity and executive function level of junior high school students can effectively predict their critical thinking.The core process of working memory capacity and the core process of executive functions are the key factors for predicting critical thinking.Fourth,working memory,particularly the process of working memory capacity,accounted for most of shared variance between intelligence and critical thinking.