One of the primary goals of higher education is to enhance students’ critical thinking skills as they work to complete their program of study. As such, it is for critical educators and academic program coordinators to have access to assessment tools that can provide accurate estimates of the cognitive and dispositional domains of higher-order thinking. Therefore, the current study was designed to provide evidence of the psychometric properties of the Critical Thinking Disposition Scale. Data were collected from 558 undergraduate and graduate students. Using exploratory structural equation modeling, we demonstrated that a 2-factor solution—consisting of critical openness and reflective skepticism dimensions—provided a good fit to the observed data. Additionally, our results showed critical openness and reflective skepticism scores were positively associated with conceptually related constructs (e.g., need for cognition and flexible thinking), demonstrating the convergent validity of the instrument. Our discussion concerns the potential utility of instrument for those interested in assessing critical thinking dispositions and avenues for future research.
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