Assessing the different kinds of learning

3. Thinking

What if you want to teach thinking skills in your course? Do any of your course outcomes focus on making judgments, comparing and contrasting, categorizing, analyzing a case study, asking questions, justifying an argument, identifying cause and effect, reading critically, recognizing assumptions and bias (own and others), creating new solutions...etc.?

If so, you'll need to design a task that has students demonstrate these thinking skills. The first step is to articulate what thinking skills you want to focus on. Are they represented in the outcomes? Do you explicitly teach them in your course, or just assume students already have them?

Here are some tips to consider if thinking skills are important in your course:

• If you are going to assess thinking skills, then make sure you give students plenty of opportunity to practice them, both freely and in low-stakes testing conditions. 
• Thinking skills lend themselves well to self-evaluation. Ideally, you want students who are self-aware of their abilities and limitations when it comes to thinking. 
• Perhaps you want to do a TRIZ (www.liberatingstructures.com) exercise with you students first and ask the question, "What does lazy, simple, biased, inaccurate thinking look like and feel like?"
• Model good thinking and be explicit about what makes it good thinking. 

Here are two resources to support your assessment of thinking skills:

1. Harvard School of Education Project Zero's Thinking Routines Tool Box
2. University of Waterloo's Promoting and Assessing Critical Thinking

STOP & THINK - Does your course emphasize thinking skills? If so, identify 2-3 of them (from the list above) and think about why they are important in the context of your course? How do you equip and empower your students to be successful thinkers? What tasks would suit the assessment of thinking in your course? How will you describe the degrees of quality of thinking?