The tools listed below can assist your program or unit in assessing students' achievement of key skills, such as critical thinking, reasoning, communication, research practices and working and thinking in a digital environment.

• California Critical Thinking Skills Test (CCTST)
  Note: Few things are more difficult and time-consuming to assess than critical thinking, and quantitative assessment of critical thinking is even harder. However, there are a few assessment tools which offer to help with this problem. The most well-known of these is Insight Assessment's CCTST. It is non-discipline-specific test that assesses students on their analytical reasoning, inference, evaluation, deduction, and induction skills. Some versions of the test also evaluate students on interpretation, explanation, and numeracy skills. The test can be administered via Blackboard.
• Business Critical Thinking Skills Test (BCTST)
  Note: Like Insight Assessment's CCTST, the BCTST assesses critical thinking skills but is designed specifically for students in business undergraduate or graduate programs.
• Health Sciences Reasoning Test (HSRT)
  Note: Like Insight Assessment's CCTST, the HSRT assesses critical thinking skills but is designed specifically for students in health sciences undergraduate or graduate programs.
• Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA+)
  Note: The CLA+ is another tool that tests critical thinking, and additionally tests communication skills. A number of schools allow students to take the CLA+ voluntarily, who provide their results, in the form of verified digital badges, to potential employers.
• Educational Testing Service (ETS) iSkills Assessment
  From the website: "Developed with the assistance of leaders from both two- and four-year colleges, the iSkills assessment requires students to demonstrate their ability to synthesize many different types of data and make sound judgments about what's accurate, relevant and useful."
  Note: The iSkills test is an interesting new effort to assess students on increasingly crucial skills: navigating, processing, and making effective use of an information-rich digital environment. While this test may be particularly valuable to programs in communications, it would be worth consideration by any program, or even for use in general education assessment.

The tools listed below are designed for general education assessment.

• Collegiate Assessment of Academic Proficiency (CAAP)

  Note: ACT's CAAP assesses up to six different skill areas: reading, writing skills, essay writing, mathematics, science, and critical thinking. It has testing modules for each of those skill areas, and an institution may choose which to include on a given test, allowing for the creation of the test that best represents its general education learning outcomes (or the learning outcomes it wishes to assess in a given year).

• Educational Testing Service (ETS) Proficiency Profile

  Note: ETS's Proficiency Profile assess four skill areas: critical thinking, reading, writing, and mathematics. It comes in two formats: a two-hour version, and an abbreviated forty-minute version. It has options for on-campus, off-campus, online, proctored, and non-proctored administrations.

The items below include a tool for data organization, assessment rubrics, and assignments based on degree proficiencies. All of these materials are free (or have a free option) but are provided for the reader’s convenience.

• Tools to Help Organize Assessment Information

  Note: Assessment Commons provides links to over a dozen computer programs that can assist you in keeping track of your assessment data. Most of this software requires payment, but at least one program -- openIGOR -- is free to use.

• Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education (VALUE) rubrics

  Note: The goal of these VALUE rubrics is not to be prescriptive or standardizing (institutional tailoring is encouraged), but to work toward a common framework that will allow for a better dialog between institutions on defining and assessing student success. The rubrics may be downloaded for free after registering with the site (also free). There are rubrics available for evaluating the following 16 learning outcomes:

  • Intellectual and Practical Skills: inquiry and analysis; critical thinking; creative thinking; written communication; oral communication; reading; quantitative literacy; information literacy; teamwork; problem solving
  • Personal and Social Responsibility: civic engagement—local and global; intercultural knowledge and competence; ethical reasoning; foundations and skills for lifelong learning; global learning
  • Integrative and Applied Learning: integrative learning

• DQP Assignment Library

  Note: The Degree Qualification Profile is a project that seeks to define expectations for degree recipients at all degree levels (associate's through master's). This library is one part of the project. It elicits assignments from instructors and matches them to DQP proficiencies, supplying a rationale for the association. Not only is this a good example of thinking about the relationship between assignments and outcomes, but all the assignments here are free to use and/or modify, should you find one you like. NILOA issued a report on the findings that have developed from the creation and use of this library, offering advice on how to catalyze assignment design based on these proficiencies at your institution.