The OCR AS level examination as a means of assessing the critical thinking skills of undergraduate students: a pilot study

With the advent of benchmark statements (Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education [QAA], 2002), psychology undergraduate degree courses in the UK are now required both to develop and assess the critical thinking skills of their students. The study reported here takes a pragmatic view of problems associated with the lack of a consensual definition of critical thinking by adopting a measure that has been implicitly endorsed by the educational establishment in the UK. The multiple choice component of the Oxford, Cambridge and RSA (OCR) AS level critical thinking examination was completed by 176 students. The results showed that the measure had a high level of internal reliability and was consistently related to performance on traditional measures of academic achievement. It is suggested that the measure is reliable enough to be used in further research.