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The reliability, factor structure, and convergent validity of the Critical Thinking Dispositions Scale (CTDS) were investigated on an ethnically diverse sample of 210 U.S. participants. Along with the CTDS, the Need for Cognition Scale (NCS) was also administered. The CTDS demonstrated fairly good internal consistency reliability, with a coefficient alpha of .79. The convergent validity of the scale was also supported, with a correlation of .40 with the NCS. While both one- and two-factor models were evaluated, the results indicated that a more parsimonious one-factor model provided the best fit to the data. Implications of the results are discussed and recommendations made for future work with the scale.
In recent years, the ability to think critically has become an increasingly important topic to researchers and educators alike (e.g., Ennis, 2008; Ku, 2009). While a handful of scales are available to measure critical thinking, very few scales exist to measure critical thinking dispositions, which can be thought of as the tendency to be predisposed to or be oriented towards critical thinking. One recent effort to this end was by Sosu (2013), in his development of the 11-item Critical Thinking Dispositions Scale (CTDS). While an initial study showed support for a two-factor solution on a U.K. sample (Sosu, 2013), additional validation work is needed, including establishing the convergent validity of the scale, as well as examining the factorial validity of the scale on participants from other countries.
Therefore, in the current study, the reliability, factor structure, and convergent validity of the CTDS will be investigated on an ethnically diverse sample of U.S. participants. This study adds to previous work by not only by providing the first examination of the convergent validity of the scale, but also by examining the fit of the CTDS on a more parsimonious one-factor model using CFA.
METHOD
The CTDS and Need for Cognition Scale (NCS; Cacioppo, Petty, & Kao, 1984) were administered to an ethnically diverse sample of 210 undergraduates (69% female, M age = 19.19 years, SD = 1.09, range = 18 to 22; 53.9% Latino/a, 20.6% Caucasian, 18.6% Asian, 3.9% African American, 2.9% other) enrolled in an introductory psychology course at a university in the western United States in the spring 2014 semester. Students received credit towards a research...