Dr. Kerig adapted the WSU rubric for use in her PSY 345, Childhood Psychopathology and Developmental Disabilities, course.  Because psychology is such a broad field, she added a category of analysis, which dealt with breaking the chosen problem into interesting and relevant constitution parts.  She decided that in psychology the analysis of context is “inextricably women into the task of identifying salient perspectives and their underlying assumptions,” so she combined these three categories from the WSU rubric into one.  She also included synthesis of the parts of an argument into a coherent whole as one of her categories of critical thinking.  In addition to assessing her students’ critical thinking she worked on developing course assignments that will provide scaffolding for students trying to improve their critical thinking.  These assignments will be used in her Fall, 2005, course.

Assignment

Dr. Kerig used the critical thinking rubric to evaluate literature reviews prepared by her students.

Rubric

Kerig Rubric