Testing the Effectiveness of CAT-Apps in improving student critical thinking skills in introductory courses

Critical thinking is widely acknowledged as the highest priority outcome of undergraduate education but is yet to be effectively targeted on any significant scale. Unpublished assessment data collected over 3 years at Georgia Gwinnett College have revealed minimal student gains in this vital skill from freshman year to senior year. It is our goal to address this inadequacy by providing students specific training in critical thinking through the use of validated and specifically tailored exercises for the classroom referred to as CAT-Apps. We include CAT-Apps in introductory courses which are mostly populated by freshmen students. We then measure the effectiveness in improving student critical thinking skills by administering pre- and post-tests. The latter are the Critical thinking Assessment Tool (CAT), developed at the Tennessee Technological University. Each experimental group is assigned two CAT-Apps over the course of one semester. We applied this experiment to courses in physical science, biology, psychology, and geography. Preliminary results show gains in critical thinking skills of the experimental groups over control groups.