Two thinking skills assessment approaches: “Assessment of Pupils’ Thinking Skills” and “Individual Thinking Skills Assessments”

This paper is linked to a previous paper outlining an evaluation of a thinking skills intervention (Burke & Williams, 2008). Following extensive requests for the assessment tools used in the intervention, this short paper presents the development and potential uses of two thinking skills assessment tools. The aim of the paper is simply to make these measures available for other researchers to use, adapt and extend them in future research. The Assessment of Pupils Thinking Skills (APTS) measure is a 14-item measure of a range of thinking skills and metacognition. The assessment can be used to provide a comparative measure across thinking skills or to provide a sum score of thinking skills and raise metacognitive awareness of thinking skills. It can be used to assess thinking skills interventions and to monitor change in thinking skills over time among 9 to 12-year-olds. The Individual Thinking Skills Assessments (ITSA) are six more in-depth measures of specific thinking skills that can be used before, during or after interventions to provide more detailed information on children's individual thinking skills. The APTS and the ITSA can be used separately or in conjunction to assess thinking skills and change in thinking skills among older children.