AI Challenge Portal

For schools

Critical thinking, connected to your curriculum.

Bring the frameworks your school works with into the same catalog as the thinking skills a challenge exercises.

Included with AI Challenge

A critical-thinking lens over your curriculum

The Cognificance layer connects your school's standards and assessment targets to one vocabulary of thinking skills and a per-item thinking-demand rating. Keep the frameworks you use and see the reasoning they call for: inquiry, analysis, argument, perspective, uncertainty, revision and communication, with AI literacy and dispositions alongside them.

Graded challenges record evidence on the skills their scoring dimensions measure. Catalog links connect those skills to standards and targets across frameworks. The Cognificance Critical Thinking Profile is formative only: no predicted test score, percentile or certified result. The layer and Profile are included with AI Challenge.

Explore the Cognificance layer, progressions, indicators and comparison with other approaches.

One catalog across jurisdictions

Standards, competencies and assessment blueprints share one catalog. A framework can describe a national curriculum, a state's standards or a school's competency vocabulary. Teachers find items by framework, kind, code, text and grade, then align a challenge to the work students will actually do.

Teachers can attach up to ten direct alignments to a challenge template. The catalog carries the publisher, version, source and required notices, so schools can see which framework an alignment comes from.

Standards and the assessments that test them

The catalog carries the complete Common Core State Standards for mathematics (K-8 and high school) and Common Core English language arts and literacy (K-12, including literacy in history, science and technical subjects), and every Next Generation Science Standards* performance expectation, K-12. It also carries every student expectation of the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills for English language arts and reading, mathematics, science and social studies (K-8 and the core high school courses), every Florida B.E.S.T. benchmark for English language arts and mathematics, and every indicator of the C3 Framework's inquiry arc for social studies. Each item shows its official code, a short description in our own words (a topic tag: the item's term of art followed by up to three aspects it covers, such as "Complex characters: development, interactions, plot or theme") and a link to the publisher. Reading labels distinguish literary and informational texts; writing labels distinguish disciplinary writing where it belongs to a separate standard. Across grades, topic tags keep the shared skill, such as word meanings, before the grade-specific details, so searching for the skill finds its progression. An assessment label marked "not on summative CAT" excludes only the computer adaptive portion; "not on summative test" excludes the whole summative assessment.

The practices that run through the standards are items of their own, so a challenge can be aligned to the way of thinking it exercises: the Common Core English language arts anchor standards, each with the grade-level standards that spell it out; the eight NGSS science and engineering practices and seven crosscutting concepts, with the grade-band elements the performance expectations draw on, each linked from the performance expectations that name it (NGSS publishes no codes for these, so the practice, concept and element codes such as SEP2, CCC3 and SEP2.3-5.4 are ours, numbered in the order of NGSS Appendix F and G); the Common Core Standards for Mathematical Practice; the Florida Mathematical Thinking and Reasoning standards; and the TEKS process standards.

California's state tests are in the catalog too, as assessment frameworks: CAASPP Smarter Balanced Mathematics and CAASPP Smarter Balanced English Language Arts/Literacy (their claims and assessment targets for grades 6, 7, 8 and 11) and the California Science Test (its domains and core ideas for grade 5, grade 8 and high school), each with its four achievement levels. Every target names the standards it samples, except the grade 11 target for composing a full narrative, which the high school test does not assess; so a challenge aligned to a standard also supports the assessment targets that test it.

When a teacher picks a standard in the challenge editor, the picker shows what it also supports: the assessment targets assessing it and their claims, the anchor standard a grade-level standard spells out, and the practice or crosscutting concept an element belongs to. Searching templates by an assessment target or claim finds the challenges aligned to the standards behind it. The teacher assistant names the same links when it suggests alignments. Links reach at most two steps, and a framework private to one institution never shows its links to anyone else.

The catalog records what the blueprints say each target samples; it does not predict test scores.

International curricula, thinking capabilities and AI literacy

The catalog carries the England national curriculum programmes of study for mathematics, English and science, every statutory statement from Year 1 to key stage 4, and the Australian Curriculum v9 general capabilities Critical and Creative Thinking and Digital Literacy, each as its complete learning continuum from Foundation to Year 10.

AI literacy is central to critical thinking now, so the catalog carries two AI literacy frameworks as competency frameworks: the UNESCO AI competency framework for students (its 12 competencies across the Understand, Apply and Create levels and their curricular goals) and the OECD/European Commission AI Literacy Framework (its 19 competences in four domains, each with Basic, Intermediate and Advanced learner expectations). Align a challenge to them as you would to a standard.

Where a framework publishes its own codes, the catalog uses them. Some codes are ours, derived from the document's structure because the publisher gives none, and each framework's description says how: every England national curriculum code, every Australian continuum code, the OECD/European Commission AI Literacy Framework's domain letters (E, C, M, S) and expectation suffixes (-B, -I, -A) around its own competence numbers, and the UNESCO framework's aspect codes A1-A4. UNESCO's competency and curricular-goal codes are its own. Every item has a short description and a link to the publisher, with the publisher's notice beside it: for the Australian Curriculum, the national curriculum in England and the UNESCO and OECD/European Commission AI frameworks the description is the official wording, shortened where it is longer than 80 characters; for the other frameworks it is written in our own words.

Framework publisher sources

Cognificance competencies in every challenge

Every challenge type names the Cognificance thinking skills it exercises, and every scored dimension names the skills it measures. Across the challenge types, the vocabulary covers questioning, assumption analysis, constructing and evaluating arguments, counterargument, perspective taking, revision, causal reasoning, uncertainty, analogical reasoning, audience communication, model limitations, mathematical modelling and reasonableness checks.

Teachers choose curriculum alignments alongside these competencies. The teacher assistant can suggest alignments; the teacher confirms what is saved.

Add the framework your school needs

Platform administrators can import a shared 1EdTech CASE CFPackage or the portal's catalog JSON, validate it, preview additions, changes and retirements, then apply it. The preview also lists any link to another framework that was left out because more than one framework item shares its identifier. Frameworks from any jurisdiction use the same tools. Imports are recorded, and a new shared framework starts disabled until a platform administrator enables it. Availability depends on suitable data and permission to use the content.

Bring your own district or school framework

Institution administrators import their own framework the same way, as a CASE CFPackage or catalog JSON. It is private to your institution: only your teachers and students see it, only your templates can align to it, and your teachers can use it as soon as it is applied, in the picker of a template kept in your institution and with the teacher assistant. The assistant offers your institution's frameworks once the template is saved in your institution; on a new, unsaved template it offers shared frameworks only.

A framework one school builds can help every school. A platform administrator can promote an institution's framework to the shared catalog, where every institution can use it at no cost, with your institution named as its contributor. The catalog is not a marketplace: no one pays for a framework and no one is paid for one. Uploading confirms you have the right to share the framework and grants the licence in the Terms.

Every upload is checked on the server before anything is saved: only JSON in the two supported formats, up to 5 MiB, with links kept as text and never followed. The uploaded file itself is not kept.

Teachers and institution administrators can choose Request a framework or assessment in the challenge editor's alignment picker. Include its name, jurisdiction, an optional official link and a note. Your account name, email and institution accompany the request to the platform administrators.

Schools can also use Contact and select Standards or assessment request. Tell us which framework you need and where it is published.

Turn your standards document into a framework file

Most schools start from a document, not a data file. Three things help you turn it into one.

Whichever you use, the server checks the file again when you upload it; a file that passed the local checker or came from the assistant gets no exception.

Find gaps in evidence and coverage

Open Gap view from a class or assignment and choose an enabled framework, including your institution's own, Cognificance skills and the formative Profile. Filter by a 1-4 thinking-demand rating or order highest demand first; each item shows its demanded skills. The hierarchy shows coverage, mean mastery, the percentage level when the framework defines one (never on an assessment framework, where a level would read as a predicted result), observation count and last observed. Weakest first shows unobserved items first, then the lowest mastery. Open an item's learners to see who has evidence and who still needs an opportunity.

Coverage is the share of current learners with an observation in the runs you can read. Mastery averages those learners' recent, weighted evidence; no evidence is never zero. Standards also contribute to the targets that assess them and their claims through the bounded catalog associations. The table lists the contributing items. These are formative observations toward an item, never predicted assessment scores.

Views support up to 500 learners, the first 100 current items in the selected demand filter and order (by code by default), the item plus up to 99 contributing items, and up to 1,000 distinct contributing items across the whole view. Past either contributor cap, the item reads "Contribution list capped; these figures cover the listed sources only." Warnings identify capped lists and derivations; weakest ordering applies to that listed subset. Cognificance Domain, Strand and Skill rows are unrated, so their demand filter and demand order are disabled. Demand filtering applies to rated standards and assessment items. Class CSV downloads require exports to be enabled. CSV columns include ThinkingDemand (empty when unrated), DemandedSkills (codes separated by "; "), ViaCognificanceSkill (true when a contributing source is marked as reached only through Demands), DemandFilter (the selected rating, empty for all), and Order (Code, Weakest, Demand or DemandThenWeakest). Demand orders are highest first; weakest ordering applies within the listed subset. The filter and order repeat on each row alongside the cap flags. Teachers see their own classes and runs under assignments they authored; institution administrators see their institution's reach.

When external results are enabled for the platform and owning institution, its administrators and platform administrators can see counts at each imported level, by administration, beside the same item. Those levels remain on a separate scale and never enter mastery. Teachers never see that overlay.

State and national assessment results (available on request)

An institution can import its students' results from a state or national assessment, for one framework and one test window (for example 2025-26 Spring), so staff see the assessment's levels next to the evidence from challenges on the same items. This is off by default and turned on for an institution only on request, once a data processing agreement with the school or district is on file.

Institution administrators upload a CSV: the student's state or district id, the overall level, an optional scale score and optional category levels. Students are matched on the id recorded on your roster, never created; rows that do not match are listed with the reason. Results are shown to your institution's administrators and platform administrators only, never to teachers or to students in their portal, and are never used to predict a score. See Privacy.

These are related approaches, not our rubrics, imported framework content, endorsements or score conversions. Cognificance's descriptions, indicators and demand scale are authored for this platform.

See the teacher guide, institution guide and full documentation.