Research shows what parents and teachers already know, and that is that critical thinking skills can be learned from a very early age. While the content being learned may be elementary, the student's ability to reason about that material, to analyze it, to draw inferences about it and to evaluate claims in the light of that knowledge are vital parts of the child's education. Now there are tools to measure these core critical thinking skills in children and adolescents. The M Series of the California Critical Thinking Skills Test has been designed specifically for these younger test takers.

The CCTST-M20 and CCTST-M25 are ideal for use with middle school children - grades six through nine, or with adolescents and adults with comparable reading skills. The CCTST-MIB is designed for children in elementary school grades three through five. As with all the members of the CCTST Family of Tests, every test in the M Series measures an individual's or group's basic reasoning skills. The CCTST-M Series scales describe one's inductive and deductive reasoning skills as well as one's analytical, inferential and evaluative skills. The CCTST-M25 and the CCTST-MIB both add a valuable additional scale: numeracy.

The CCTST M Series instruments use a familiar multiple-choice format. Age-appropriate questions use comfortable, everyday, common sense topics to engage the test-taker in applying his or her critical thinking skills. Items present needed information for test takers using both diagrammatic and text-based contexts. The items range from those requiring an analysis of the meaning of a given sentence to those requiring much more complex integration of critical thinking skills. Administered either on-line or paper-and-pencil 45 minutes.

 Critical thinking is about being both willing and able to think. The CCTST M Series instruments measure the "able" dimension. The companion tool which measures the "willing" dimension is the California Measure of Mental Motivation series of instruments for these same grade levels.