Historically, Child Friendly School programming has been designed to avoid a "minimalist" approach to student learning and has instead focused on building learning competencies in the higher order thinking skills. While there have been calls from some quarters for the program to refocus on basic minimum learning competencies, program planners in KAPE and elsewhere have so far resisted the temptation to do so. This actually be-came a major issue during the development of Minimum Learning Stan-dards (MLS) under the CBE Project, leading eventually to a name change in terminology where such standards are now known as Curriculum Stan-dards. Nevertheless, the pressure to cater to the lowest common denomina-tor continues to be a major dilemma for Child Friendly School Projects, particularly as programming goes national.

While there is general consensus among many psycho-metricians about what sorts of tasks constitute critical thought, there is less agreement about what constitutes creative thinking or whether such thinking skills can be measured at all. This fact notwithstanding, several theorists have shown intense interest in efforts to measure creativity (e.g., Guilford, 1974). In the main, such efforts have focused on what is known as divergent thinking, that is, reasoning processes (as opposed to products) that emphasize movement in multiple directions and which allow for the possibility of multiple solu-tions to any given problem. This is to be contrasted with convergent thinking (more generally used in critical thought) where test takers are required to use established principles to solve problems that have but one possible solution. The tests utilized by ESCUP have tried to incorporate some of this thinking on the questions employed in its creative thinking tests.

ESCUP hopes that by structuring learning assessment as hands-on activities, as demonstrated in the pictures, rather than as unimagina-tive paper and pencil tests, the project will be better able to drive home the idea to teachers what the program hopes to achieve and how they should be teaching.