EDUCATE INSIGHT Grades K-2

Population: EDUCATE INSIGHT for Grades K-2 is calibrated for children (regardless of their chronological age) who are learning at grade levels K through 2.

Administration: Read aloud to children in an educational setting.  Children record their responses on paper testing booklets by circling their answer choices.  Teachers or aides then quickly and easily enter the child’s responses for immediate scoring using our user-friendly online assessment 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: Duration of read-aloud testing sessions for young children varies.

• Habits of mind part: 25 simple Agree/Disagree items – child level opinion, value, and expectation statements; easily completed in much less time than the recommended max of 30 minutes.
• Skills part: Untimed.  Four five-question sets.  Each set is based on an engaging, young child focused scenario. Readers typically administered no more than one or two sets (4 or 8 questions) in a session.

Deliverables: Group graphics with statistical summary of scores; Excel spreadsheet of responses to 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

• Critical Thinking Skills and an OVERALL rating:

1. Categorization –Grouping objects according to perceived common characteristics
2. Explanation – Expressing the reasons relied upon to reach judgments or decisions
3. Analysis – Identifying the elements needed for problem solving
4. Inference – Drawing conclusions from reasons, evidence, observations, experiences
5. Evaluation – Assessing the credibility of claims and the strength of arguments

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

Scoring:

• Each grade level K-2 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 K-2 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.

Culturally Competent Translations:

• Habits of Mind part: English, Chinese Traditional, Chinese Simplified, and Spanish.
• Critical Thinking Skills part: English 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/post-test 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.

Technical Definitions of the Core Critical Thinking Skills Developed During Early Childhood

• OVERALL: 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.
• Categorization: Categorization is the cognitive process by which objects are identified, recognized, and grouped according to a perceived common characteristic. Categorization enables understanding language, predicting the behavior of, inferring the characteristics of, and deciding how to behave toward or how to interact with objects grouped into the same category. Categorization one of the sub-skills of interpretation.
• Explanation: Explanation is the process of justifying what we have decided to do or what we have decided to believe. People with strong explanation skills provide the evidence, methods, and considerations they relied on when making their judgment. Explanations can include our assumptions, reasons, values, and beliefs. Strong explanations enable others to understand and to evaluate our decisions.
• 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.

The EDUCATE INSIGHT Grades K-2 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 scores 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 K-2 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 K-2 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.