Insight Assessment was established as The California Academic Press in 1986 by Dr. Peter A. Facione, a leading figure in the quest to demonstrate empirically that a consensus understanding of critical thinking could be attained and that the core cognitive skills and centrally important dispositional habits of mind of critical thinking could be learned, taught, and assessed.

In 1990 The California Academic Press published its first reasoning skills test and in 1992 its first critical thinking disposition inventory. Since that time research has continued on the development of a broader array of reasoning assessment tools and on expanding what is known about critical thinking, problem-solving, and decision-making. The focus of this research has been on integrating humanistic and scientific approaches with the expressed purpose of achieving practical gains. The aim is to assist people in becoming better thinkers by knowing how thinking works, how improvements in thinking can be learned, how mistakes in thinking can be identified and avoided, and how one can use meta-cognition as well as objective assessment information to improve one's own thinking.