Why is Fall Testing Important?
Fall testing (testing incoming students) is a first step in a comprehensive analysis of educational effectiveness.
- Directors of Educational Effectiveness test students to obtain diagnostic data for evaluating individual students’ strengths and weaknesses in critical thinking skills and dispositions as they enter programs of study.
- Fall test data provides useful advising information for guiding students working to complete educational degree programs and professional preparation programs.
- Fall data describes new cohorts of students as they enter academic schools or programs, providing useful information to all faculty engaged in classroom level training of critical thinking.
- Fall data establishes a baseline for the comparison of entering cohorts over time. Campus cohorts can be followed in relation to national norm groups, marking their performance toward a campus quality enhancement goal, and providing an objective measure of improvement in student’ critical thinking.
- Obtaining baseline data on entering cohorts is one way to measure the impact of new curriculum or pedagogical approaches at both the program and campus level. With a well-planned pre-post test design, data can be used to follow targeted test takers throughout their program, assessing the long term of specific curricula.
- Research on the effectiveness of various strategies for training critical thinking skills and habits of mind in differing educational contexts has become a valuable contribution to student learning. Researchers obtain data at the beginning and end of a designed learning opportunity to examine evidence of the effectiveness of the strategies used to train critical thinking.
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