Knowing that the transition to college life often entails a steep learning curve, many colleges and universities teach a Freshman Studies course in ‘college survival skills.’  Topics cover communication skills, learning strategies, and critical thinking skills. College success is the result of well made decisions that lead to the accomplishment of degree requirements, while staying healthy and managing outside responsibilities.

Freshman Seminar and First Year Success Directors are adopting programs using Insight Assessment critical thinking measurement tools to pretest and posttest their students’ critical thinking skills and critical thinking habits of mind.  They recognize that critical thinking may just be the most important and widely espoused college level student learning outcome–and that regional accreditation organizations are looking to First Year Success and Freshman Seminar programs as vehicles through which institutions can deliver and assess their core learning outcomes. Strong critical thinking skills and positive critical thinking habits of mind are vital to academic success in every academic discipline and major field of study.

Students with weak thinking skills too often fail to excel and may consequently drop out of school. Proactively measuring critical thinking skills and attributes of incoming students gives academic support services the data needed to target at-risk students and connect them with the necessary developmental programs, boosting student success and increasing overall retention.

Insight Assessment offers a comprehensive selection of critical test instruments that are calibrated to measure critical thinking skills and dispositions of specific test takers. These test instruments include:

• The California Critical Thinking Skills Test (CCTST) is being used worldwide to provide valid, objective and reliable measures of the core reasoning and critical thinking skill of undergraduate and graduate students. The CCTST has been proven to predict strength in critical thinking in authentic problem situations.
• The California Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory (CCTDI) measures test takers’ motivation to apply critical thinking skills in decision making and problem solving. The CCTDI is calibrated for use with the general adult population including workers and working professionals at all levels, and for students in grades 10 and above.
• The Test of Everyday Reasoning (TER): Widely used in 2 year colleges, the TER is designed to measure the critical thinking skills of test takers in secondary schools, the first two years of post secondary education or of adults of all ages in the general public.
• College Student Success (CSS) is a nationally normed standardized assessment of the specific reasoning skills and personal mindset attributes predictive of success as in college. It  is appropriate for first year undergraduates, transfer students, college success programs and non-traditional student admissions.

Insight Assessment’s cost-and-time-effective tests of critical thinking skills rely on case-based scenarios to provide objective, valid and reliable measures of core problem solving and decision making skills.  Assessment solutions are available using either on-line testing or paper-and-pencil testing. Contact Us to discuss your testing needs or to discuss strategies for pre and post testing students in your program.