Abstract:

With the advent of information and intelligent society, the cultivation of college students’ higher-order thinking ability has received unprecedented attention. Adhering to the principles of “scientificness” and “locality”, and based on the evaluation of college students’ learning outcomes and the 2001 version of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, this study developed a higher-order thinking ability test for Chinese college students based on the actual situation in China, elaborated on the specific development process of this test, and analyzed the reliability, validity, question quality, and rationality of the equivalence scheme of this test, using the actual measurement data of three universities and the quality analysis method of the standardized test of educational measurement. The results show that this assessment has good reliability, reasonable structural validity, and good ability to distinguish students of different types of universities and different grades in China. The analysis of the test question parameters based on the classic test theory shows that the test questions are of good quality; the test uses non-equal sets of common question designs to achieve equivalence between different versions of the test papers, and the equivalence scheme is scientific. This study indicates that as a standardized test in a strict sense, the higher-order thinking ability test for Chinese university students is stable, reliable, and effective, and is suitable for the practice of evaluating the learning outcomes of Chinese university students. Its research and development process and quality verification methods have important enlightening significance and reference value for similar tests.

Key words: higher-order thinking skills, college students learning outcomes, test quality, China, equivalency