Assessment of Thinking Skills

This chapter reviews the assessment of thinking skills. We describe different types of thinking and a variety of individual skills subsumed within these thinking domains. We also identify four general categories of assessments, including aptitudes and achievement, knowledge, procedural understanding, and attitudes. We discuss different levels of understanding within each category that affect the planning, development, and scoring of assessments. We also provide five guidelines to improve assessment practice. We conclude with three recommendations. One is to use a broad array of assessments at multiple levels of understanding to capture the widest range of thinking and learning. A second is to use test blueprints based on multi-dimensional taxonomies to enhance the content validity and interpretative utility of assessments. A third is to develop rubrics to increase the reliability and validity of assessments.