Five powerful reasons to invest in the assessment of new student critical thinking skills and mindset
1. Admit Skilled and Motivated Applicants
- Assure that your incoming students have the ability and desire to complete their planned program of study. Students with stronger critical thinking skills and mindset are better able to learn complex material, to solve problems, attain professional certification and transition to the workplace. Integrate the assessment of critical thinking skills and mindset attributes into admissions programs to identify and enroll candidates who have the capacity and desire to engage complex problems using sound critical thinking. Improved student selection leads to better learning outcomes, better graduates and a rising academic reputation.
2. Improve Student Retention and Student Success
- Assure that your students have the reasoning skills to successfully complete their academic programs. Students with weak critical thinking will struggle academically, become frustrated, and not persist in their studies. Why wait? Immediately identify students at risk of academic difficulty. Provide your retention and advising office with each individual’s test results. Intervene with targeted critical thinking development programs before these students fall behind their degree program objectives. Support success by linking a self-assessment of thinking and reasoning by the world’s leading assessment tools to emphasize to students the value of critical thinking for learning, for career and for life.
3. Drive Quality Improvement
- A strong measurement plan is the key to a successful quality improvement project. There are many demands these days for solid, objective learning outcomes assessment data – accreditation, program review, admissions, research, academic advising, retention and success services, and more. Developing strong critical thinking in students is a challenging goal widely embraced by education stakeholders at every level, including employers, policy makers and faculty. Many of Insight Assessment’s customers use one or more of our instruments to gather the detailed evidence required to refine curricular approaches and to demonstrate achievement of students’ learning outcomes to their accrediting agencies
4. Demonstrate the Value of your Educational Offerings
- Today’s educational culture is investing more than ever into the development of effective online and residential programs. Document students’ growth in thinking mindset and reasoning skills as a result of your online and residential degree programs, and provide each student with a personal assessment report. Use group reports to document gains for accreditation and quality improvement initiatives.
5. Enhance Systems of Institutional Effectiveness
- Add the impact of critical thinking assessment data to your institutional database. Institutional planning requires the best information available to guide the future of your institution. In today’s competitive educational environment, there is no substitute for an accurate assessment of the quality of new educational programs, the effectiveness of student retention initiatives, and the demonstration of the attainment of performance-based outcomes.
Add the impact of critical thinking assessment data to your institutional database. Use our downloadable high quality graphic and statistical reports to celebrate institutional effectiveness with benefactors and alums, and to report achievements to accreditation agencies and performance based funding agencies. Our interactive report generation system, along with the versatility of our testing interface, enables you to provide separate group reports for each academic unit.
Institutions select Insight Assessment because we provide:
- proven, validated assessment instrumentation,
- institutional level and profession-specific benchmarking,
- demographic data integration and more.