How to use assessment data collected through writing activities to identify participants’ critical thinking levels

The present paper aims at presenting the Critical Thinking (CT) Skills assessment results in teachers participating in the Erasmus+ KA203 CRITHINKEDU summit (Critical Thinking Across the European Higher Education Curricula), organised in Leuven in June 2019. Within the summit, a workshop was organized to promote in participants’ CT skills knowledge, especially in terms of CT assessment methods through open-ended questions. Based on our theoretical assumptions, description and interpretation activities of written text promote skills such as Analysis, Argumentation, Inference and Critical evaluation, which can also be defined in terms of improvement of language skills. Teachers participating in the workshop were assessed through a test composed by literary text paraphrase and commentary exercises; a prototype for the automatic assessment of CT in open-ended answers was used to evaluate the open-answers. Also three human raters evaluated the answers’ texts. The goal of the present research was to verify the assessment method reliability and to collect some data useful for the implementation of the automatic prototype.