The Construction of A Group Assessment of Logical thinking (GALT)

บทคัดย่อ

The assessment of developmental reasoning is becoming a necessary part of teaching. The results can be used to modify science teaching strategies and help teachers better understand students’ intellectual development. Clinical interviews are often used to assess students’ cognitive development. However, they are time consuming and require trained interviewers. To avoid these problems, many classroom tests of cognitive development have been developed. However, non measures more than five modes of reasoning and most are influenced by students’ reading and writing abilities. In light of these limitations, the investigator developed the Group Assessment of Logical Thinking (GALT) that (1) validity measures six logical operations, and (2) can be reliably administered in one class period. Items were constructed which presented a problem. The student was to select the best answer and write his justification for that answer. The Fog Index was used to adjust sentences to produce a written test at or above the sixth grade level. Each of the twenty-one items included pictorial representations of real objects. During development, GALT was administered to students whose written justifications for each item were used to construct multiple choice justifications. In final form GALT was administered to 628 subjects in grades 6 though college. Conventional clinical interviews were conducted with some students as a means of investigating the validity of GALT. Coefficient alpha for GALT was .89. The internal consistency of each subtest ranged from .13 to .85 Item difficulties averaged .55. Item discrimination indices averaged .44. The mean inter correlation coefficients for subtests averaged .49. These results show that GALT has a high reliability and adequately measures six logical operations.