With a well designed pre-post test program, data can be used to follow a targeted group of students or track the overall growth of cohorts of students to assess the long term and/or short term impact of curriculum and programs. 

Pre & post testing is a testing model designed to examine the change in overall critical thinking skills or dispositions in a group of test takers. It's reasonable to post test as soon as a few weeks after a focused training program in critical thinking, but most often a post test is gathered months or years after the pretest. One common example for university settings is a pretest at the befinning of a degree program and a post test so...

Post-test data should be gathered at a time when students have sufficiently completed an educational experience so as to have engaged and further developed their critical thinking, but not so late in their educational experience that they are not motivated to commit the cognitive energy to give their best effort on the post-test. e.g.  five weeks before the end of the academic year when comparing seniors and freshmen, three weeks befor...

A student’s lack of motivation to give their best on a post-test is one of the largest threats to the validity of the data gathered.  If post-tests cannot be gathered from all students, a robust representative sample can be used.  However voluntary testing and convenience sampling are strongly discouraged.  Motivating students to give their best effort can be accomplished by offering incentives such as extra points toward cou...

Testing instruments sold by Insight Assessment have met the threshold for strong internal consistency reliability (a minimum Alpha of 0.80 for attribute measures and a minimum KR-20 of .72 for skills measures) and are observed to maintain this performance in all samples of adequate variance.  A discussion of instrument validation process and related internal consistency reliability coefficient is provided in the user manual for each in...

Pretest and posttest your students' critical thinking skills and critical thinking habits of mind using Insight Assessment's critical thinking measurement tools. The difference between the pre and post test results will demonstrate the effectiveness of your curriculum.  Contact one of our doctorally prepared academic assessment specialists to discuss cost-effective data gathering strategies for pre-post testing students in your program...

Gathering pre-test data from entering students enables matched pairs analyses of pre-test and post-test data in which each individual’s post-test is compared with that same individual’s pre-test.  For this method of analysis to be successful, it must be possible to match pre-test and post-test for the same individual.  Hence a coding system of some kind is needed, e.g. ID number, investigator designated code number, or test-taker....

At pre-test students are generally motivated to engage testing with reasonable levels of effort, so pre-test data can be gathered by testing entering students as early in the instructional program as possible, ideally in the first session if not prior to the first session.  Pre-testing the entire group of entering students is optimal.  However, a representative sampling of individuals may be sufficient for aggregate pre-test to po...

It is increasingly important for educational organizations to document achievement of students' learning outcomes. Many of Insight Assessment’s customers use one or more of our instruments to gather the detailed evidence required to refine curricular approaches and to demonstrate educational success for accrediting bodies. Effective assessment programs identify goals for the attainment of critical thinking skills and habits of mind lea...

No. It is not necessary to use different forms of the CCTST to pretest and posttest. Valid pretest/posttest designs can be implemented using just one of the forms. If you are not sure about how to do this, give us a phone call to talk about your project and its design. Students report remembering the questions, because they are interesting, but not remembering how they answered the questions -- because they have to reason out the answers ea...