Presented By: Department of Psychology
Psychology Methods Hour: Measuring critical thinking through performance tasks: What reliability to report?
Kai Cortina, Professor of Psychology, and Blake Ebright, Combined Program in Education & Psychology (CPEP) Graduate Student
Scientific journals/reviewers routinely - and for good reasons - ask for reliability statistics for the research instruments. While for traditional questionnaires this is easy to do (usually Cronbach's alpha), it gets very complicated when the psychological construct under consideration is complex. We demonstrate this for the data we collected using "performance assessments" that measure critical thinking in college students. It is misleading in this case to merely report the interrater reliability as it is most commonly done.