Critical Thinking – a definition and taxonomy for Cambridge Assessment: supporting validity arguments about Critical Thinking assessments administered by Cambridge Assessment

This research can be seen as an activity in order to contribute towards the validity arguments of assessments. One aspect of validity is that the internal structure of any assessment should be consistent with that of its content domain. However, this notion is predicated upon having some working conception of the construct or content domain. The particular domain in question is that of Critical Thinking. Despite it being a relatively new subject, Cambridge Assessment now has a history of over two decades of assessing Critical Thinking. Increasingly, Critical Thinking skills are being recognised and valued in educational and work settings, leading to a high demand for tests and assessments to measure and acknowledge these skills. Over time, the range and nature of these assessments have grown and evolved, with an understanding of the construct of Critical Thinking being transmitted implicitly through the coincidence of common personnel involved in the development and item writing. Cambridge Assessment, in order to inspect the construct validity, representativeness and coherence across its Critical Thinking assessments, needed an explicit working conception of the domain of Critical Thinking. This paper will present the process of deriving a Critical Thinking definition and taxonomy as well as mapping the assessments against it in order to judge the degree of curriculum relevance.