What about these informal assessments? On-site assessments can make it harder to clearly distinguish between critical thinking and language skills. In this blog series, Christine talks about how we can integrate critical thinking into language learning to help our students develop academic skills along with language skills. With these different skills in mind, we can separate language skills and critical thinking skills in formal assessment and assess them separately. By clearly differentiating language skills and critical thinking skills in the assessment, you can measure each student’s progress in these two skills. When developing rubrics to assess language and critical thinking, you should focus on only one of them – language or critical thinking. But it is during the creation of the final paper that you will be able to see your students’ critical thinking skills in action. Like all skills, critical thinking should be assessed both formally and informally. She has authored several books and articles and has conducted a series of webinars on critical thinking and assessment in the EFL classroom. Many people believe that critical thinking cannot be assessed, especially in classes with weak language proficiency. This type of assessment plays a crucial role in measuring critical thinking. And if you want to do hands-on activities in your classroom, read Christina blog post about teaching critical thinking. There are several common myths associated with critical thinking and assessment. Listen to “her” interview about the importance of critical thinking in the English classroom on our podcast. You can learn more about critical thinking from Christina’s webinar series. And in doing so, we must be careful to develop rubrics that distinguish between language proficiency and metacognition. She has a master’s degree in TESOL from West Virginia University and did a one-year internship at Princeton in 2009, where “she” researched Web 2.0, language learning, and blended learning.