EDUCATE INSIGHT Grades 3-5

Population: EDUCATE INSIGHT for Grades 3-5 is calibrated for children (regardless of their chronological age) who are learning at grade levels 3 through 5.

Administration: Administer at any time, in any location with our user-friendly, encrypted, online, multi-lingual interface.

Support Materials: EDUCATE INSIGHT User Manual includes all needed information for the administration and interpretation of individual and group scores. A separate EDUCATE INSIGHT Debrief Document, which client may elect to provide to the persons who are assessed, is available at no additional charge.

Specs: Max 75 minutes timed administration.

• 30 minutes allotted for 45 Likert-style Agree/Disagree items – child level opinion, value, and expectation statements.
• 45 minutes allotted for 20 engaging, childhood-focused scenario-based reasoning skill evaluation questions.

Deliverables: Group graphics with statistical summary of scores; Excel spreadsheet of responses of all custom demographic questions, and all scores for each person tested. Optional individual score reports for administrators and/or test takers. 

Results Reported (Actionable Metrics):

• Critical Thinking Habits of Mind:

1. Mental Focus – Being diligent, systematic, task-oriented, and organized
2. Learning Orientation – Being eager to learn, to gain and use new information
3. Creative Problem Solving – Feeling imaginative, ingenious, original, and able to solve problems
4. Cognitive Integrity – Valuing fair-mindedness and sound reasoning to reach good decisions
5. Scholarly Rigor –Putting forth mental effort to understand and master new material

• Critical Thinking Skills and an OVERALL rating:

1. Inductive Reasoning – Critical thinking in ambiguous and uncertain contexts
2. Deductive Reasoning – Critical thinking in precisely defined, logically rigorous contexts
3. Evaluation – Assessing the credibility of claims and the strength of arguments
4. Analysis — Identifying the elements needed for problem solving
5. Inference – Drawing conclusions from reasons, evidence, observations, experiences
6. Numeracy – Critical thinking in contexts involving quantitative information

OVERALL Reasoning Skills: Sustained use of critical thinking to form reasoned judgments

Scoring:

• Each grade level 3-5 critical thinking mindset attribute is scored on a 50-point scale divided into five qualitative categories (Strongly Positive, Somewhat Positive, Emerging, Somewhat Opposed, Strongly Opposed).
• Each grade level 3-5 critical thinking skill metric is scored on a 100-point scale with five corresponding qualitative ratings (Advanced, Meets Expectations, Partial Demonstration, Little Demonstration, No Demonstration).

Optional Custom Questions: At no additional cost clients can add up to ten client-specific custom descriptive survey demographic questions to the assessment profile to enable sub-group reports.

Percentile Scores: Population comparison percentile scores (external validity criterion): Standard Grades 3-5 Percentiles, High Performing Grades 3-5 Percentiles

Culturally Competent Translations: English, Chinese Traditional, Chinese Simplified, and Spanish.

Licenses to Administer: Sold globally exclusively to public and private educational institutions; DOE, NSF, NIH, RWJ, and other grant-funded projects; education program evaluation consultants; doctoral dissertation scholars; and other government and agency level entities.

Comprehensive assessment support services are available to not-for-profit educational organizations, government agencies, NGOs, dissertation scholars, and funded research clients.

Starting with an initial consultation to learn about your project, our experienced assessment specialists support your project in multiple ways, all included with your purchase of account setup and assessment use licenses. 

• Instrument selection: We help the client find the academic assessment instrument(s) which best fit the educational level and broad subject matter area of the individuals to be assessed.
• Administration strategies: Clients can keep test takers anonymous or use personal identifiers; sampling methods can measure an aggregated group profile without testing everyone.
• Privacy Protection: We assist the client with privacy protection strategies, including, if needed, completely anonymous double-blind assessments.
• Assessment logistics: We help clients assess program applicants onsite or remotely, gather pretest/posttest learning outcomes data, and generate individual or group logins.
• Introducing client-specific custom questions: Clients can enable organizing, managing, and analyzing the assessment data that they plan to collect by introducing up to ten client-designed demographic profile questions. We assist clients with this process.
• Client assessment administration setup: We orient the client to the use of their assessment administration interface by walking them through the processes of creating a testing assignment, including designating the start and end dates and choosing whether to display on-screen assessment results to the individual test-taker.
• Report Generation: We orient clients on the use of the online report generation tool that produces customized group reports, aggregating and disaggregating data by the demographic variables they have collected (e.g., Training group, admission cohort, school, program, or any other custom demographic data that the client may have included).
• 24/7/365 emergency technical support for our client testing administrators.

We demonstrate how easy it is to administer assessments even to very young students using our intuitive, browser-based, multilingual online testing system on almost any device: computer, tablet, or smartphone.

Preview Packs enable future clients to experience the intended assessment tool in exactly the same way it will be used in their planned project. The user manual and two logins are included.

Technical Definitions of Critical Thinking Habits of Mind Nurtured During Childhood

• Mental Focus: Mental focus is the discipline or habit of being diligent, systematic, task-oriented, organized, and clear-headed. A positive score indicates a person who endeavors to stay on task and approach problems and learning in systematic, focused, organized, and timely way. Mental focus is valuable because it directs attention to the duties and responsibilities of the task at hand.
• Learning Orientation: The Learning Orientation is the tendency or habit of seeking to increase one’s knowledge and skills; toward valuing the learning process to accomplish mastery over a task; toward being interested in challenging activities; and toward using information seeking as a personal strategy when problem solving.
• Creative Problem Solving: Creative Problem Solving is the habit or tendency of approaching problem solving with innovative or original ideas and solutions; toward feeling imaginative, ingenious, original, and able to solve difficult problems; toward engaging in activities such as puzzles, games of strategy; and toward striving to understand the underlying function of objects.
• Cognitive Integrity: Cognitive integrity is the habit of interacting with differing viewpoints for the sake of learning the truth or reaching the best decision, it is the tendency to express strong intellectual curiosity and value fair-mindedness and sound reasoning.
• Scholarly Rigor: Scholarly Rigor is the habit of working hard to engage and to correctly interpret new material, it is the tendency to put forth the mental effort to achieve a deeper understanding of complex or abstract ideas and information.

Technical Definitions of the Core Critical Thinking Skills Developed During Childhood

• OVERALL Reasoning Skills: The Reasoning Skills OVERALL score describes overall strength in using reasoning to form reflective judgments about what to believe or what to do. To score well overall, the test taker must excel in the sustained, focused, and integrated application of core thinking skills measured on this test, including analysis, interpretation, inference, evaluation, explanation, induction, and deduction. The Overall score predicts the capacity for success in educational or workplace settings which demand reasoned decision making and thoughtful problem solving.
• Analysis: Analytical skills are used to identify assumptions, reasons, themes, and the evidence used in making arguments or offering explanations. Analytical skills enable us to consider all the key elements in any given situation, and to determine how those elements relate to one another. People with strong analytical skills notice important patterns and details.  People use analysis to gather the most relevant information from spoken language, documents, signs, charts, graphs, and diagrams.
• Inference: Inference skills enable us to draw conclusions from reasons, evidence, observations, experiences, or our values and beliefs.  Using Inference, we can predict the most likely consequences of the options we may be considering. Inference enables us to see the logical consequences of the assumptions we may be making. Sound inferences rely on accurate information. People with strong inference skills draw logical or highly reliable conclusions using all forms of analogical, probabilistic, empirical, and mathematical reasoning.
• Evaluation: Evaluative skills are used to assess the credibility of the claims people make or post, and to assess the quality of the reasoning people display when they make arguments or give explanations. We can also apply our evaluation skills to assess the quality of many other elements that are important for good thinking, such as analyses, interpretations, explanations, inferences, options, opinions, beliefs, hypotheses, proposals, and decisions. People with strong evaluation skills can judge the quality of arguments and the credibility of speakers and writers. 
• Induction: Inductive reasoning relies on estimating likely outcomes. Decision making in contexts of uncertainty relies on inductive reasoning. Inductive decisions can be based on analogies, case studies, prior experience, statistical analyses, simulations, hypotheticals, trusted testimony, and the patterns we may recognize in a set of events, experiences, symptoms, or behaviors. Inductive reasoning always leaves open the possibility, however remote, that a highly probable conclusion might be mistaken. Although it does not yield certainty, inductive reasoning can provide a solid basis for confidence in our conclusions and a reasonable basis for action.
• Deduction: Deductive reasoning is rigorously logical and clear cut. Deductive skills are used whenever we determine the precise logical consequences of a given set of rules, conditions, beliefs, values, policies, principles, procedures, or terminology. Deductive reasoning is deciding what to believe or what to do in precisely defined contexts that rely on strict rules and logic.  Deductive validity results in a conclusion which absolutely cannot be false, if the assumptions or premises from which we started all are true. Deductive validity leaves no room for uncertainty. That is, unless we decide to change the very meanings of our words or the grammar of our language.
• Numeracy: Numeracy refers to the ability to make judgments based on quantitative information in a variety of contexts. People with strong numeracy can describe how quantitative information is gathered, manipulated, and represented textually, verbally, and visually in graphs, charts, tables, and diagrams. Numeracy requires all the core critical thinking skills. Numeracy includes being thoughtfully reflective while interpreting the meaning of information expressed in charts, graphs, or text formats, analyzing those elements, drawing accurate inferences from that information, and explaining and evaluating how those conclusions were reached.

The EDUCATE INSIGHT Grades 3-5 Report Package includes group summary reports for each group and sub-group in the sample and an individual test-taker report for each person assessed.

Reports are generated immediately after the conclusion of testing and are available for clients to download making real time assessment possible. Read more about how our customer support specialists work with clients to select their reporting options on our Services tab or contact us for a consultation.

Group analytics include:

• Clients can generate and download Excel spreadsheet files of all scores (OVERALL and all cognitive score metrics). These also include the responses to optional custom demographic questions added by the client to the assessment profile, and percentile score corresponding to the external comparison group selected by the client.
• Presentation-ready tables and graphic representations of the score distribution for OVERALL critical thinking skills and for the additional cognitive mindset and skill metrics.
• Organizational and institutional clients who have added custom demographic questions can generate sub-group level reports for these variables, or for specific testing sessions or time periods.   

Optional Individual Reports include:

• Each Grade 3-5 critical thinking mindset attribute is scored on 50-point scale divided into five qualitative categories (Strongly Positive, Somewhat Positive, Emerging, Somewhat Opposed, Strongly Opposed).
• Each Grade 3-5 critical thinking skill metric is scored on a 100-point scale with five corresponding qualitative ratings (Advanced, Meets Expectations, Partial Demonstration, Little Demonstration, No Demonstration).
• The Individual Reports can be pushed as PDF files to an email address of the client’s choosing, e.g., to school or departmental office.
• Organizational and institutional clients can control whether individual reports are made available on screen to the child after her or his test session is completed.
• Free upon request, a short PDF assessment report debrief document, which can be distributed by the client to the people who were assessed.