Assessing and teaching what we value: The relationship between college-level writing and critical thinking abilities

Washington State University (WSU), has developed two large-scale assessment programs to evaluate student learning outcomes. The largest, the Writing Assessment Program, diagnoses student writing abilities at entry and mid-career to determine the type of support needed to navigate the expectations of our writing-rich curriculum. The second, the Critical Thinking Project, has developed an assessment instrument, the WSU Guide to Rating Critical Thinking, adaptable by faculty to their instructional and evaluative methodologies, which we can employ across the curriculum to evaluate student critical thinking outcomes. The development of these two measures has provided insights into limitations of each measure and the student learning outcomes produced. Further, the results of our studies question current mainstream writing assessment practices, common assumptions about writing and critical thinking, and several aspects of higher education classroom and curricular praxis.

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