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 Insight Assessment customers use one or more of the custom questions within our instruments to gather more detailed evidence required to refine curricular approaches and to demonstrate achievement of students’ learning outcomes to their accrediting agencies.

Insight Assessment’s testing system enables clients to create up to ten custom demographic items.  Custom questions can be designed by the client and added to the test instrument.  Our team will work with you to craft these questions.

Custom questions enable test administrators to better organize their results.  Custom questions can be used to gather the classification and demographic metrics needed to support analysis and grouping of test results.

FAQs:  Getting the most out of our custom questions option

1. What kinds of questions can I ask the people I’m testing using the custom demographics items?

Just about anything that it is permissible to ask.  Custom demographic questions, to aggregate and disaggregate your data. For example, you can ask about educational background, employment background, which department or work group a person is a member of, or how much time a person spends on a given activity.  If you know the choices you want test takers to select from, you can supply them. If you want the test takers to enter a free text response, that works too.

2. What are some examples of custom demographic items?

Here are four examples.  You are able to create your own custom demographic items to best fit with your assessment plans.

•  Type your student ID number here:  _______________

•  What is your highest level of formal education?
  • Advanced degree
  • Baccalaureate degree
  • Associates degree
  • High School Diploma or GED
  • Eighth Grade
  • Fourth Grade
  • None

• Which professor assigned you to take this test?
  • Adams
  • Gomez
  • McDonnell
  • Smith

• Which Division of our company do you work in?
  • Accounting
  • Customer Relations
  • Human Resources
  • Marketing
  • Physical Plant & Security
  • Research & Development
  • Upper Management

3. If I want to do a pretest and posttest analysis, anonymity will be important.  How can I set that up in the IA testing system?

There is a very straightforward procedure using the custom demographics option.

First create an identifier that will link a given person’s pretest with that person’s posttest.  The identifier can be a four digit pin number, for example, that you create. Assign each individual their unique identifier. 

You will then ask them to insert that unique identifier as a free response answer to a custom question.  Each person will do that when they login to take their pretest and again when they login to take their posttest. When you download test results in spreadsheet form, use that code to sort the data and, thereby, associate each person’s pretest and posttest. The custom demographic item you would create might look like this:

• Write the code number you were assigned here __________________

4. How can I learn more about creating custom demographic items?

Easy, just contact Insight Assessment. We are happy to assist clients in getting the most helpful information possible when using our testing instruments and our powerfully versatile testing system.

Call us today at 650-697-5628 to learn how easy it is to gather valid, reliable and educationally useful critical thinking assessment data that includes contemporary demographic understandings.

Insight Assessment does not use any of the data gathered through customer designed questions. We do not advise the use of the customer designed questions to collect data that would jeopardize the security or identity of any test taker. Insight Assessment is not responsible for any misuse of this data. In addition, collecting data that may be used to support discriminatory or illegal business practices is strictly prohibited. They are for you to decide and for your use alone.