The Civic Argument Literacy Test (CALT) – Foundations and Development

Abstract The Civic Argument Literacy Test (CALT) is a new instrument for measuring how individuals recognise, interpret, and evaluate arguments in civic discourse. This research essay sets out the conceptual and theoretical foundations of the CALT and, as its central contribution, the design principles underlying its ten diagnostic parts. After defining argument literacy as a civic competence and locating the construct within rhetorical theory, argumentation studies, and the new literacy studies tradition, we describe how each dimension is operationalised as a concrete task, and how this relates to existing operationalisations in psychological and pedagogical research studies. We further describe the deliberate move from fully authentic to semi-authentic civic materials, and the iterative shaping of the ten-part structure across two pilot studies and a validation study. A cross-linguistic survey of argumentation, rhetoric, and critical-thinking textbooks provides content-validity evidence: the components the CALT operationalises recur as chapter-level topics in independently authored works from distinct academic traditions. The CALT translates concepts from rhetorical and argumentation theory – enthymemes, argument schemes, rhetorical proofs, visual argument, fallacy recognition – into scalable tasks embedded in semi-authentic public discourse, intended for upper secondary and undergraduate populations. The validation study provides evidence ( N = 178, UK adults aged 18–25) that the CALT has good reliability as a total-score measure, and we discuss its dimensionality and discriminant validity. By bridging argumentation theory with empirical assessment, the CALT contributes to experimental argumentation research, offering a diagnostic tool for studying how citizens process arguments across contexts and populations.