The Instruments

The CCTST (Facione, 1990; P. A. Facione & N. C. Facione, 1994) was developed, validated, and used for assessing students’ CT skills. It is a standardised, 34-item multiple choice test, non discipline-specific that targets core critical thinking skills. Each item on the CCTST is assigned to one of three subscales: Analysis, Evaluation, and Inference.

The CM3 is sold by Insight Assessment and is designed to measure the degree to which a student feels that they are cognitively engaged and mentally motivated toward intellectual activities that involve reasoning. This test contains seven scales of critical thinking: (a) truth‐seeking, (b) open‐mindedness, (c) analyticity, (d) systematicity, (e) confidence in reasoning, (f) inquisitiveness, and (g) maturity of judgment. It offers online and paper formats and a Likert response type. 

The California School Climate and Safety Survey-Short Form is a self-student reported questionnaire created to assist the state of California in monitoring the creation of safe schools as required by the 2001 federal law, No Child Left Behind. It measures overall school climate and personal-safety related experiences.

CampusReady is an instrument that examines schools’ strengths and weaknesses in preparing students for college. Originally known as the CollegeCareerReady School Diagnostic when it was first introduced in 2009, CampusReady utilizes David Conley’s Four Keys to College and Career Readiness, which comprise cognitive strategies, content knowledge, academic behaviors, and contextual skills and awareness. CampusReady target respondents are students in grades 6-12, teachers, counselors, and administrators. 

The CARE-Index is an observation instrument that measures mother-child interaction and is designed for children ages birth to 2 years. The instrument, which requires a short videotaped play interaction, provides sensitivity, control and unresponsiveness subscales for mothers and cooperativeness, compulsivity, difficultness, and passivity subscales for children.

The Career Adapt-Abilities Scale (CAAS) consists of four scales, each with six items. The four scales measure concern, control, curiosity, and confidence as psychosocial resources for managing occupational transitions, developmental tasks, and work traumas. A short form also exists. 

Initially intended to assess the impact of a career planning program at a gifted and talented baccalaureate magnet high school in a Southeastern city, the College and Career Readiness Self-Efficacy Inventory (CCRSI) is a tool that measures an individual's belief in their ability to enter a career pathway and be successful in higher education settings.

The Caregiver Interaction Scale (CIS) is an instrument that measures parent and caregiver behaviors and interactions with children. The instrument consists of 26 items focused on sensitivity, harshness, detachment, and permissiveness. CIS was created in 1989 at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill’s Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute and used in the evaluation of North Carolina’s Smart Start Initiative.

The 18-item Classroom Climate Scale measures three components of students' or teachers' perceptions of their classroom climate: student-student relationships, student-teacher relationships, and awareness/reporting. Respondents are asked to indicate the extent to which they agree or disagree with a series of declarative statements.

The Challenging Situations Task (CST) is designed to assess a child's affective and behavioral responses when presented with hypothetical peer situations. The design of this instrument consists of the presentation of pictures of a particular situations, accompanied by verbal descriptions. Children are then prompted to indicate how they feel about the situation and asked to choose from four emotion choices using schematic drawings.

The Child Caregiver Interaction Scale (CCIS), Revised Edition is an observation-based instrument created by Dr. Barbara Carl, Ph.D that assesses caregiver-child interaction. The 14 items are based upon the Developmentally Appropriate Practice position statements of the National Association for the Education of Young Children’s (NAEYC) and the National Health and Safety Performance Standards. The CCIS, which measures emotional, cognitive/physical, and social behaviors, is appropriate for children from birth to 5 years.

The Child Engagement Questionnaire (CEQ) measures the engagement of young children. Adults who know the child well complete the questionnaire. CEQ has 32 items on a four-point scale (1 not at all typical, 2 somewhat typical, 3 typical, 4 very typical). CEQ focuses on four domains: competence, persistence, undifferentiated behavior, and attention. 

The Child-Parent Relationship Scale (CPRS) is an instrument developed at University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education and Human Development that assesses parents’ views of their relationship with their child. Created by Dr. Robert Pianta, Ph.D., the instrument consists of 30 items. There is also a short form with 15 items available.

The Children's Empathic Attitudes Questionnaire (CEAQ) is a self-report measure of empathic attitudes (modifiable knowledge structures that influence behavioural choice) towards peers, teachers, other children, animals, or other people.

This 22-item questionnaire is designed to assess children's perceptions of their ability to enact prosocial verbal persuasive skills in specific peer situations. 12 scale items describe conflict situations, and 10 items describe non-conflict situations. Students are asked to respond to each situation on a four-point Likert scale.

The CIRCLE Classroom Observation Tool is primarily used as a coaching tool to support the development of high-quality instruction in early childhood classrooms. The tool is used to rate teachers' behavior and instruction during classroom observation visits spread over a full academic year.

Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) developed the Freshman Survey for collecting data on incoming college freshmen. The CIRP Freshman Survey focuses on the following domains: established behaviors in high school, academic preparedness, admissions decisions, expectations of college, interactions with peers and faculty, student values and goals, student demographic characteristics, and concerns about financing college. 

Year developed: 1966.

The Classroom Assessment Scoring System™ (CLASS™) is an observational instrument developed to assess instructional quality in PK-12 classrooms. It is a tool for analyzing the quality of teacher-student interactions in the classroom by capturing multiple dimensions of teaching that are linked to student achievement and development. It produces qualitative ratings of teacher performance on a scale from 1-7 across three broad domains: emotional support, classroom organization, and instructional support.

Student-reported sense of class cohesion, belonging, trust, and feeling heard.

The Classroom Climate Scale was created to gauge elementary students' perceptions of school climate. It measures four key dimensions of school climate to help teachers improve school climate and classroom management. It builds on a previous school climate measure used in Chilean public schools by giving the survey robust psychometric qualities.

COEMET is a classroom observation instrument that evaluates classroom culture and the use of specific math activities. It includes questions about how actively the teacher interacts with the children, how the teacher uses teachable math moments, how math is displayed in the physical environment of the room, how confident the teacher appears about math, etc. The specific math activities measured are not connected to a specific curriculum.

The Classroom Practices Inventory is a classroom observation measure for early childhood classrooms. It is designed to assess the developmental appropriateness of classroom and curricular practices, teachers actions, children's activities, and teacher-child interactions.

The College Academic Self-Efficacy Scales (CASES) measures college students’ self-reported academic self-efficacy. CASES asks respondents to rate their confidence in various college activities such as note-taking, asking questions, writing, and class attendance. CASES has 33 items using a 5-points Likert scale ranging from 0 “very little confidence” to 4 “quite a lot of confidence”.

Year developed: 1988.

The College Readiness Assessment (CRA) is a learning progression-based measure of the trajectory of students’ abilities to connect representations of mathematical functions in grades 6-12. As a formative assessment building on cognitive research in mathematics learning, the CRA aims to help students transition smoothly from middle school to college-level math coursework.

The College Readiness for Global Campus Survey was developed by Lee et al. (2019) to explore the college readiness of US and international undergraduate students. College readiness measures of the College Readiness for Global Campus Survey focus on two domains: academic readiness and sociocultural readiness. The academic readiness domain includes academic competencies such as critical thinking, problem-solving, computing skills, note-taking, presentation and test-taking skills, reading, writing, and mastery in subject areas.

The College Readiness Scale (CRS) was designed to measure college readiness for teenagers with ADHD. It is a self-report measure focusing on behaviors related to college readiness (Maitland & Quinn, 2011). The 43-item scale has three subscales:

The CSSWQ was intentionally designed as a brief measure of cumulative subjective wellbeing. As such, only one or two relevant indicators were selected to represent each wellbeing domain, resulting in a measurement model consisting of five college-grounded positive psychology traits: college gratitude (emotional domain), academic self-efficacy and academic satisfaction (cognitive domain), school connectedness (social domain), and academic grit (behavioral domain)

The College Survival and Success Scale (CSSC) measures noncognitive college readiness. First designed in 2006 and in the 2nd edition since 2011, the subscales that CSSC assesses include:

• Commitment to education.
• Self- and resource-management skills.
• Interpersonal and social skills.
• Academic success skills.
• Career planning skills.

Items are Likert-type, with response options ranging from “a lot like me” to “not like me.”

Year developed: 2006 (2nd edition since 2011).

Self-reported survey designed to assess denial of the existence of racism and racial dynamics. Higher scores on each of the CoBRAS factors and the total score are suggested to be related to greater:  (a) global belief in a just world; (b) sociopolitical dimensions of a belief in a just world, (c) racial and gender intolerance, and (d) racial prejudice.

This survey uses the risk and protective factor model to assess youth problem behaviors including violence, delinquency, school dropout, and substance abuse. It also includes youth feelings of family relationships and community climate.