National Academy on Critical Thinking Testing and Assessment To Compare Leading Testing and Assessment Strategies.

Berkeley, CA -- The Foundation for Critical Thinking announced today it will be comparing leading international tracking, testing, and assessment instruments at its three-day National Academy on Critical Thinking Testing and Assessment to be held on water's edge at Berkeley's Double Tree Hotel and Marina Conference Center on September 11 -- 13, 2007.

Established tests will be compared with new tests and instruments under development by the Foundation for Critical Thinking. Assessment instruments will include both multiple-choice and constructed-response tests. Comprehensive and subject-specific approaches will be canvassed, as well as critical thinking reading and writing tests. Emphasis will be put on the concept of "consequential validity;" that is, the likely impact upon teaching and learning by adopting one vs. another testing and assessment protocol. Summative and formative evaluation will be covered as well as norm-referenced vs. criterion-referenced testing. The academy is designed for faculty and administrators at high school, community college, college and university levels.

A seminal pedagogical concept and cadre of best practices that accompany all forms of inquiry, discourse, and understanding in virtually every domain and discipline, critical thinking is the foundational competency behind all learning. It's the key to learning how to learn and to taking ownership of knowledge and skills in all other domains and disciplines. How critical thinking is tracked, tested, and assessed in the context of other subject domains and disciplines gets right to the heart of the fundamental question, "What is education and how do we measure it?"

For over a quarter century the Center for Critical Thinking through the Foundation for Critical thinking has led the worldwide movement to research, define, assess and place critical thinking at the heart of educational reform. Throughout it has emphasized and argued with significance in behalf of teaching critical thinking in a strong, rather than in a weak, sense. It is committed to a clear and substantive concept of critical thinking (rather than one that is ill-defined or vague); a concept that interfaces well with the disciplines that integrate critical with creative and strategic thinking to emphasize the affective as well as the cognitive dimension of critical thinking and which highlight intellectual standards and traits.

The Foundation advocates a concept of critical thinking that organizes instruction in every subject area at every educational level, around it, on it, and through it across the curriculum. Tracking, testing and assessing critical thinking contextually across the curriculum within every domain and discipline is at the core of a number of controversies taking place within education and government aimed at improving the way we teach, learn and assess.

The Academy will be led alternately by Dr. Richard Paul, Director of Research and Development at the Center and 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."

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

* "Intellectual work, deeply conceived, conduces to significant changes in intellectual skill and understanding," said Paul. "Critical thinking, if somehow it became generalized in the world, would produce a new and different world; a world which increasingly is not only in our interest but is necessary to our survival. We are far from such a society, but we need to think about it. It needs to be part of our vision."

"You can't really recognize, understand or change for the better anything you haven't thought about," said Elder. "To the extent our intellect enables us to independently explore, think and integrate knowledge deeper, broader, and better -- transcending our social conditioning, prejudices, and ideologies to reconcile new insights and realities with independently constructed conclusions that allow us to constantly mid-course correct our beliefs -- the faster, more educated, skilled and even-handed we become in our professions and in our daily lives. The cultivation of well-tempered minds, our intellectual integrity, is at the heart of our character and everything we do as people and societies. So, it's our hope the National Academy will define and build consensus for the assessment strategies that will allow us to best get a handle on this process in the classroom."

ENDS