Dr. Peter Facione, Insight Assessment Senior Researcher, was a featured speaker at the January 19 & 20, 2012, Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) Northern and Southern California Resource Fairs.  Dr. Facione presented “Assessing Critical Thinking Usefully.”   Applying critical thinking to the issue of critical thinking assessment, Dr. Facione provided a systematic overview of issues that need to be addressed when evaluating alternative critical thinking assessment solutions.  Effective assessment solutions must address the many complex educational, theoretical, practical, political, and economic pushes and pulls on an academic institution’s assessment program:  validity, reliability, cost, use of faculty time, selection of students to be tested, quality of student effort, relevancy of norms, credibility of the results, objectivity of scoring, utility of the results for curriculum development and other academic purposes etc.   Dr Facione focused on the questions faculty members and academic leaders must ask as they prepare to evaluate the relative strengths, benefits, risks, and weaknesses of alternative modalities of critical thinking assessments.