Photo: Herald Sun

The world-first target aims for a 25 per cent increase in Year 10 students with excellent critical and creative thinking skills by 2025.

Achieving this target will mean more than 20 per cent of Victorian Year 10 students will be assessed to have excellent critical and creative thinking skills by 2025.

This includes analytial skills, reasoning processes, the ability to unpack problems and build logical, compelling arguments.

Critical and Creative Thinking was introduced into the curriculum for prep to Year 10 students in 2016 and an online assessment tool to test these skills was trialled at 52 schools last year.

The assessment tool was developed by the Department of Education and Training and the Victorian Curriculum Assessment Authority, and covers a range of skills relating to questions and possibilities, reasoning and meta-cognition.

Students are tested on a range of hypothetical situations or problems that require critical and creative thinking skills to answer. Year 10 students will start taking the online assessment annually from this year.

The ability to think critically and creatively will help students improve in all subjects and give our students the skills they need for jobs in a global, high-tech and changing economy.

The Andrews Labor Government has set a number of targets to lift student performance as part of its plan to make Victoria the Education State.

This includes targets in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) subject with a 25 per cent increase in the number of Year 9 students reaching the highest level of achievement in maths and 33 per cent more 15-year-olds reaching the highest levels in science by 2025.