Children's Inferential Thinking Modifiability (CITM)
The CITM is aimed at assessing young children's learning potential, cognitive functions, inferential thinking, and mediated learning strategies with 4–7 year old children. It is composed of four sets of problems for Pre-Teaching, Teaching, Post-Teaching and Transfer phases.
The problems are composed of figural 'sentences,' each presenting information about the possible location of objects in houses with different-colored roofs.
Cognitive functions required
- Systematic exploratory behavior
- Control of impulsivity
- Spontaneous comparative behavior
- Planning
- Inferential-hypothetical ('iffy') thinking
- Need for precision
- Simultaneous consideration of several sources of information
- Negation
The CITM includes a Classification test to examine whether the child can classify 24 objects across categories: animals, clothes, furniture, shapes, transportation, and plants. The child is first asked to classify all objects according to some principle and explain the answer. After mediation, the child re-classifies the objects, and a derived improvement measure is recorded.
The CITM is used with children demonstrating learning difficulties and with children with language difficulties.