Cross-cultural Equivalency of the California Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory

This study describes the cross-cultural applicability of a multidimensional inventory of students' evaluation of critical thinking dispositions (California Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory). The goal was to assess the cross-cultural psychometric equivalency of the CCTDI through testing measurement invariance across American and Turkish linguistic populations. Based on the data from 583 Turkish students and 448 American students from different teacher education programs, the translated Turkish version and the original English version of the CCTDI displayed positive psychometric properties, thus supporting the applicability of the CCTDI in a Turkish educational context with alpha coefficients ranging from .81 to .90 for the sub-scales of the CCTDI Turkish and ranging from .85 to .91 for the sub-scales of the CCTDI English. Results also supported high content validity across cultural versions of the inventory with minimum content validity indices of .81 and .97 for both the Turkish and American versions of the inventory, respectively. However, a cross-cultural comparison of the factorial structure produced a poor fit of the hypothesized multidimensional model of CCTDI to the combined sample. Further analysis, based on the modification indices, supported the use of a four-factor model with reduced items for cross-cultural comparative research studies. Reasons for poor model fit and non-invariance across cultural groups were elaborated.