What type of questions assess critical thinking in the Language Arts section of MoCA?

Inference-based questions are designed to assess critical thinking because they require students to go beyond the text to interpret, deduce, or draw conclusions based on the information provided. These types of questions usually involve analyzing context, understanding subtleties, and making connections that are not explicitly stated. This means a student has to think critically about implied meanings, character motivations, or themes, rather than just recalling facts or directly stated elements from the text.

In contrast, fact-based questions typically focus on recalling specific details from the reading material, while directly stated questions often require a straightforward answer that can be found verbatim in the text. Fill-in-the-blank questions might assess vocabulary or comprehension at a basic level, but they do not require the level of critical analysis needed to infer meaning, which is essential for the higher-order thinking evaluated through inference-based questions.