College readiness
How can colleges make sure new students have the skills to succeed in their coursework? It’s important to identify applicants who are eager and ready to learn and succeed.
Critical thinking skills are among the most important college readiness skills and behaviors. Strong critical thinking skills and positive critical thinking habits of mind are vital to success in every academic discipline and major field study.
Strong critical thinking skills and the motivation to learn predict student success and retention.
Assessing college readiness skills
Students must be both able and willing to apply their critical thinking skills in decision making and problem solving. Students need drive, motivation, resilience, and the thinking skills to successfully engage their programs. These are also the skills and habits of mind that your incoming students will need to be prepared for their future.
The best assessments of college readiness should include both a measure of thinking skills with a measure of their disposition toward using thinking as a preferred means of problem solving.
High Schools — independent, charter, public and private — are gathering solid evidence of their students’ critical thinking and mathematical reasoning ability using Insight Assessment instruments tailored for the high school student population. High schools frequently use EDUCATE INSIGHT Reasoning Skills Grades 9-12 paired with EDUCATE INSIGHT Thinking Mindset Grades 6-12.
Community Colleges use the Test of Everyday Reasoning (TER) and the California Measure of Mental Motivation, Level III to gather vital data on the critical thinking skills and dispositions of incoming students to tailor student success services.
Higher Education: The two part College Student Success (CSS) is also used to evaluate the transfer readiness of students preparing to apply to obtain a clear profile of the potential new student’s reasoning skill set, motivation to learn, drive to succeed and much more.
Valid, objective data to support student success
Sometimes, students struggle with their coursework. Too often when the semester is over and the academic grades are issued, the moment when a student might have been rescued from academic problems at a given institution has long passed.
Assessment data can be used to predict successful college admission. It can also be used to proactively identify which students would most benefit from focused training in reasoning and decision making.
- Optimize Admissions: Identify incoming students who have the strongest potential to learn and the motivation to complete your program requirements.
- Strengthen student placement programs: Use comprehensive individual report data to provide guidance on first term course selection and necessary support.
- Increase retention and increase degree completion: Individual reports provide early identification of students who need academic advising, remediation and additional resources.
- Strengthen Support Programs: Develop support programming based on group report data documenting the thinking strengths and weaknesses of class cohorts.
- Validate the effectiveness of subjective competency-based teaching approaches and guiding curriculum innovations to respond to group strengths and weaknesses in critical thinking.
- Document achievement of learning outcomes: pre and posttest comparison provides evidence that students are learning the necessary critical thinking skills to complete degrees
Insight Assessment delivers validated, proven test instruments that are calibrated to target the specific reasoning skills and personal mindset known to be predictive of college readiness and student success. Comprehensive reports analyze individual and group strength and weakness. Assessments can be completed using any mobile or browser based device. Our state-of-the-art online assessment technology is applicable to all learning environments.