HIGH SCHOOL AND COLLEGE ADMISSIONS
Admissions committees typically rely upon a range of indicators to assist them in student selection, but, as you know only too well, student selection is more of an art than a science. Standardized tests tell you only so much about students' capabilities, yet it is likely that you don't even look at applications from students who haven't achieved a certain level on one of these assessments. There are good practical reasons for using these scores in this way, but there is a price. Some of the best students fall through the cracks, and some students who are very high performers on standardized assessments just don't have what it takes to succeed at your institution.
Part of the reason is that standardized tests can't tell you how well students think, and how well they think is one of the best predictors of how well they will perform in a given academic setting. In the past, some test designers have tried to examine reasoning skills, but these attempts have been widely criticized for bias or irrelevance. Our assessments reduce bias, because our scoring system is content independent. And we don't assess reasoning with meaningless test problems. We invite students to show off their reasoning about real-world problems, then score their performances for the complexity of their logical structure and their level of abstraction—not their particular content.
Since 1993, our founder, Theo Dawson, has been designing, testing, and working with a developmental assessment system called the Lectical™ Assessment System. The system is based on Harvard Professor Kurt Fischer's Dynamic Skill Scale, and can be used to score the developmental level of any sample of reasoning in any area of knowledge.
The scale we use is composed of 13 levels, which cover the entire life-span. Our assessments have been designed to capture the top 5 levels of the scale, which are commonly observed from age 4 onward. High school requires reasoning at level 10. Most college courses require level 11 reasoning. Our assessment system reliably distinguishes 4 phases per level, a degree of granularity that is about the same as that aheived by high quality standardized assessments.
For general information about our assessments, click here.
Decades of research have shown that students with more developed reasoning skills are more likely to succeed in challenging academic settings. This is because more challenging curricula require more complex reasoning, and the complexity of students' reasoning increases with development. For example, most first year college curricula prepare students with the knowledge and skills they will need to progress to level 11. Students who perform in phases 10:4 and 11:1 are optimally prepared to learn in this kind of environment. In other words, they are likely to learn what their professors intend. Students who perform in phases 10:2 and 10:3 are likely to struggle, and are less likely to learn as intended. Students who are already reasoning above phasel 11:1 may be extremely bored with 100 series courses that require a great deal of memorization, and end up performing poorly or dropping out.
Standardized assessments like the SAT are not assessments of reasoning skill. They are assessments of knowledge. Lectical assessments of reasoning skill complement assessments of content knowledge, adding another dimension to your knowledge of a given student's current capabilities, and helping you to make more informed selection decisions.
Some students have high scores on standardized tests and low scores on lectical assessments. These are often highly intelligent students who have successfully memorized a great deal of content knowledge. Based on grades and test scores, they are often admitted into challenging schools, but disappoint their instructors by failing to reason well about what they have learned. Other students have low scores on standardized tests and high scores on lectical assessments. These students, who are often unusually talented, may not be admitted into the very schools in which they would excel. We hate to think how many talented students fall through this "assessment gap" each year.
Cognitive developmental psychologists have studied how students learn to reason in many knowledge areas, including, math, science, ethics, decision making, art, and the social domain, among others. One area that has undergone extensive study is reflective judgment (a component of critical thinking). Researchers repeatedly have found that students whose reflective judgment is more developed learn better than students whose reflective judgment is less developed.
Building on the work of Perry and Kitchener & King, we have designed a general assessment of student's reflective judgment—the LRJA. This assessment, which requires students to reason through one of several challenging real-world dilemmas, is composed of a set of essay questions, followed by a short preference survey. Level of performance on this assessment provides important information about how students reason and how they are likely to approach knowledge and learning.
All assessments are scored by Certified Lectical Analysts, who are required to maintain a high standard of accuracy and reliability (85% agreement within 1/4 of a level with a Master Lectical Analyst). It is important to understand that lectical scores are not like grades or percentile scores, which tell you where a student performs relative to other students. Lectical scores are more like positions on a ruler or thermometer. Each level and phase is defined in terms of the structure of the reasoning tasks someone performing at that level can accomplish. This ruler-like quality is unprecedented in academic assessment. It makes it possible for us not only to provide a score, but to tell you what that score means for a student's learning. It means that we can tell you what each student who takes one of our assessments is most likely to benefit from learning next.
| All reports include | ||
| 1. | a lectical score, with an explanation of its general meaning, | |
| 2. | information about the meaning of that score relative to the student's age and educational level, and | |
| 3. | learning recommendations. | |
If you are interested in asking students to include LRJA results in their applications, would like to follow up on a special offer, or would like more information, email us anytime.
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