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- Title
Assessing critical thinking through L2 argumentative essays: an investigation of relevant and salient criteria from raters' perspectives.
- Authors
Sato, Takanori
- Abstract
Although some second language (L2) pedagogical approaches recognize critical thinking (CT) as an important skill, its assessment is challenging because it is not a well-defined construct with varying definitions. This study aimed to identify the relevant and salient features of argumentative essays that allow for the assessment of L2 students' CT skills. This study implemented a convergent mixed-methods research design, collecting and analyzing both quantitative and qualitative data to collate the results. Five raters assessed 140 causal argumentative essays written by Japanese university students attending Content and Language Integrated Learning courses based on five criteria: Task Achievement, Coherence and Cohesion, Lexical Resource, Grammatical Range and Accuracy, and CT Skills. A standard multiple regression was conducted to examine the relationships among these criteria. Additionally, raters' written verbal protocols were collected to identify the essay features to be considered when assessing students' CT skills. The results indicated that raters' judgments of students' CT were closely linked to Task Achievement. Furthermore, their assessments were affected by the essay's relevancy to the question, content development, logicality, and quality of ideas. This study's findings help to conceptualize CT as a construct and should be incorporated into the assessment criteria of various L2 educational contexts.
- Subjects
CRITICAL thinking; SECOND language acquisition; EVALUATION; MULTIPLE regression analysis
- Publication
Language Testing in Asia, 2022, Vol 12, Issue 1, p1
- ISSN
2229-0443
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1186/s40468-022-00159-4