As professionals, we are faced with the challenge of designing courses that maintain an expectation of rigor and opportunities for challenging students to use critical thinking skills to the greatest degree possible. However, with minimal experience in instructional design, assessment design, and sufficient pedagogical training (Brownell & Tanner 2011; Handlesman et al., 2004; Ebert-May et al., 2011), many professors are left with asking themselves, “What does it mean to critically think?” and “How do I effectively measure and assess critical thinking of the students enrolled in my classes?”. To further complicate the issue, there exists no agreed upon standard definition for critical thinking, nor does a reliable assessment tool for measuring critical thinking currently exist (Bandyopadhyay and Szostek, 2019; Hart, Da Costa, Kimpton, and Ljbusic, 2021; among others).

What we are left with is relying on theory and best practices for designing instruction and assessment that moves us away from the model of memorizing vocabulary, equations, and content, and moves us towards instruction and assessment that provide opportunities for our students to analyze, interpret, and evaluate through reflective practices and thoughtful engagement with the global challenges of their discipline.

Furthermore, there exists a mismatch between traditional assessment methods and their ability to assess student’s critical thinking skills (Shively, Stith, & Rubenstein, 2018), outside of standardized assessments such as California Critical Thinking Skills Test (CCTST), the Halpern Critical Thinking Assessment (HCTA), the Watson–Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal Tool (WGCTAT), the Cornell Critical Thinking Test (CCTT), the Ennis–Weir Critical Thinking Essay Test (EWCTET) and the HEIghten Approach, among others (as mentioned in Hart, Da Costa, D'Souza, Kimpton, and Ljbusic, 2021)

Given the lack of a clear evidence base for assessing and defining critical thinking in higher education, our purpose is to identify a reliable pedagogical framework for identifying and assessing critical thinking in the college classroom that is aligned with best practices and theory (e.g. Bloom’s), that will support students in demonstrating an ability to be creative in their academic endeavors, while also demonstrating an awareness of and the ability to critically evaluate their work with some level of fidelity (Lai, 2011) until a reliable evidence-base is established for application across disciplines.

Within a critical thinking instructional framework, professors and instructors will have to commit to taking responsibility in understanding how to identify and assess students’ ability to think critically in objective ways. In addition to measuring student thinking, college and university level professors and instructors must value, reflect on, and implement assessment models that reliably integrate the components of critical thinking, problem solving, and decision making (as defined by the literature) while supporting and enhancing their student’s ability to base their understanding of critical course concepts on evaluating arguments and propositions (Huitt, 1998). In this paper, the authors intend to provide an instructional framework that outlines the possibilities of using creative ideas in the classroom to analyze and assess students’ ability to not only understand content, but also critically think about course concepts applicable to a variety of disciplines.

Keywords: Critical Thinking, Business Education, Student Assessment.