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10-01-2007: The 2007 National Academy on Testing and Assessment Report


The 2007 National Academy on Testing and Assessment Report

Foundation for Critical Thinking

Foundation for Critical Thinking
News
For Immediate Release
Contact: Hunter Finch
707-878-9100 X 17
hfinch@criticalthinking.org
The National Academy on Critical Thinking Testing and Assessment
Releases its 2007 Report and Recommendations

Dillon Beach, CA (10/01/07) – The Foundation for Critical Thinking released its “National Academy on Critical Thinking Testing & Assessment Report” today. The Report summarizes the Academy’s findings and makes specific “recommendations on using the assessment of critical thinking to drive instruction.” A Power Point Slide Show of the Report is available to media representatives upon request: hfinch@criticalthinking.org

The 3-day Academy held in Berkeley, California earlier this month, hosted faculty, professional developers, and administrators from high schools, colleges, universities as well as from government, business and industry. This year’s focus at the Academy compared the leading tracking, testing and assessment strategies, as well as the instruments for assessing critical thinking, in use to today. Dr. Richard Paul, Director of Research and Development at the Center for Critical Thinking, Chair of the National Council for Excellence in Critical Thinking, and Dr. Linda Elder, Executive Director of the Center and President of the Foundation for Critical Thinking alternately led the comparisons and discussions.

Comprehensive and subject-specific approaches were canvassed, as well as critical thinking reading and writing tests. The concept of “consequential validity” (that is, the likely impact upon teaching and learning by adopting one vs. another testing and assessment protocol) was emphasized and critiqued among the diverse applications represented. Summative and formative evaluations were covered as well as norm-referenced vs. criterion-referenced testing.

Although the term “critical thinking” is gaining currency, in a way similar to the “critical thinking” trend of the 1980’s, it often lacks a robust meaning. When understood deeply, and fostered through the assessment process, it leads to a high degree of consequential validity. Faculty who are assessing a substantive concept of critical thinking will, by implication, need to foster a substantive concept of it in their work with students.  With a robust concept of critical thinking at the heart of instruction, a concept which fosters the analysis and assessment of reasoning, as well as intellectual dispositions (such as fairmindedness, intellectual humility and intellectual empathy), faculty begin to understand critical thinking as the common denominator in learning how to learn, and the fundamental conceptualization for taking ownership of knowledge and skills in all domains and disciplines. Because critical thinking is presupposed in every subject and discipline, the manner in which it is tracked, tested, and assessed within the context of subject domains and disciplines gets right to the heart of the fundamental question, “What is education and how do we measure it?”

 
”Our notion of knowledge is shifting from an ability to recall information to an ability to find and use information intelligently,” said Paul. “Nothing is more relevant to learning, and therefore to teaching, than critical thinking, which provides the intellectual tools students need to study and process information from within any and all disciplines. Students and teachers need to move away from didactic instruction and rote memorization and towards understanding disciplines as modes of thinking, or systems of thought. Students must come to see, through instruction, that learning within any subject or discipline means learning to think within the discipline, to target its purposes, formulate and pursue the questions asked within the discipline, gather the kinds of information used within the discipline, make the kinds of judgments made within the discipline, think within the point(s) of view of the discipline, think within the concepts and assumptions in the discipline, and follow out the implications of thinking within the discipline. To do this, our goal must be as follows: Every student, in every classroom, at every moment intellectually engaged.”
 
 
 
According to Dr. Elder, “the Academy brought into perspective the diverse range of fads in teaching and learning and, therefore, to testing and assessment that educators, business, government and industry are struggling with today. Politicians, governments, and parents don’t really understand the complex, intricate, demanding and often messy world of intellectual development, although they think they do. As a result our educators are looking at a failing federal mandate that, for all its best intentions, ties our hands while it dumbs down our profession and our students. Most of the educators we’re hearing from tell us the ‘No Child Left Behind’ initiative is dramatically demonstrating what happens when you emphasize popular standardized ends of education over the critical intellectual means to education. As a result, we’re seeing a mounting plea for a shift of emphasis away from memorization into critical thinking. This consensus was very evident at the Academy."

 
For more than a quarter century the Center for Critical Thinking in conjunction with the Foundation for Critical thinking has led the worldwide movement to research, define, assess and place critical thinking at the heart of educational reform. The Center and Foundation for Critical Thinking seek to promote essential change in education and society through the cultivation of fair-minded critical thinking, thinking predisposed toward intellectual empathy, humility, perseverance, integrity, and responsibility. These sister organizations are committed to a clear and substantive concept of critical thinking rather than to one that is ill-defined or vague; a concept that interfaces well with the disciplines that integrates critical with creative and strategic thinking, that emphasizes the affective as well as the cognitive dimension of critical thinking and that highlights intellectual standards and traits.

In a world of accelerating change, intensifying complexity, and increasing interdependence, critical thinking is now a requirement for economic and social survival.

For more about The Foundation for Critical Thinking, see http://www.criticalthinking.org 

Dr. Paul, Director of Research at the Center for Critical Thinking, recently called for integration of critical thinking instruction and best practices across the curriculum in every domain of knowledge and belief in his keynote address at The 27th Annual International Conference on Critical Thinking. (An edited transcript with graphic files and video clips are available at http://www.criticalthinking.org/pages/critical-thinking-in-every-domain-of-knowledge-and-belief/698)

Photos:

 

Linda Elder     

Richard Paul

Dr. Linda Elder, Executive Director of the Center,
President of the Foundation for Critical Thinking          

 Dr. Richard Paul, Director of Research and Development
at The Center for Critical Thinking, Chair of
The National Council for Excellence in Critical Thinking