Critical thinking has been identified as a crucial general skill contributing to academic and career success in the twenty-first century. With the increasing demands of the modern workplace and a global trend of accountability in higher education, educators and employers pay great attention to the development of students' critical thinking skills throughout their training. Therefore, there is an urgent need worldwide for an updated and comprehensive assessment tool of college-level critical thinking. This paper reports on the preliminary validation for the Russian version of the HEIghten? Critical Thinking assessment developed by Educational Testing Service (ETS). Based on a large Russian college student sample (N?=?1060), we evaluated the psychometric quality of the items, individual and institution-level reliability, external validity, and student perceptions. Overall, the results suggested good psychometric quality, except that a few items showed low discriminating power and should be further examined with a second wave of data collection. IRT analyses revealed testlet effects and supported the essentially unidimensional structure of the measure. Appropriate correlations with external criteria provided support for the measure's convergent validity. Implications of the preliminary validation study results and the future research agenda, especially the need to collect longitudinal data, are discussed.

Assessing student learning outcomes has become a global trend in higher education. In this paper, we report on the validation of the Chinese HEIghten (R) Critical Thinking assessment with a nationally representative sample of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science students from 35 institutions in China. Key findings suggest that there was a test delivery mode effect favoring the paper tests over the online tests. In general, the psychometric quality of the items was satisfactory for low-stakes, group-level uses but there were a few items with low discrimination that awaits further investigation. The relationships between test scores and various external variables such as college entrance examination scores, university elite status and student perceptions of the test were as expected. We conclude with speculations on the key findings and discussion of directions for future research.

In responding to the need for internationally comparable data on higher education student learning outcomes, some modules of the HEIghten (R) Outcomes Assessment Suite, developed by Educational Testing Service, have been translated and adapted for international use. This recent development points to a critical need to validate the use of translated and adapted HEIghten assessments in international contexts. This chapter reports on validating the use of the Russian HEIghten Quantitative Literacy (QL) assessment with a representative group of students majoring in electrical engineering and computer science from 34 higher education institutions in Russia. Our findings provided preliminary evidence in support of the use of the assessment for the target population as a measure of QL. Future research is suggested to further investigate the test's ability of reflecting changes in the target construct as a function of learning in the context of Russia.