Assessment Instruments for Twenty-First Century Skills
It has been established in previous chapters that learning and teaching has significantly evolved over the past few decades, toward a greater emphasis on twenty-first century skills in the school curriculum. Twenty-first century skills are incorporated in
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Assessment Instruments for Twenty-First Century Skills
It has been established in previous chapters that learning and teaching has significantly evolved over the past few decades, toward a greater emphasis on twenty-first century skills in the school curriculum. Twenty-first century skills are incorporated into national educational standards in many countries; assessments, however, have been less emphasized as integral components of these new models (Hilton 2010). Inquiry- and project-based learning interventions involving research as well as technology require compatible methods of assessment to support learners’ progress and development (Cachia et al. 2010). This chapter begins with an overview of previous literature on assessment of twenty-first century skills, then discusses the use of assessments in a variety of research studies conducted by the authors, and proposes an evidence-based approach for assessing different aspects of twenty-first century skills. Education practitioners and researchers should bear in mind that some of the twenty-first century skills such as life and career skills are not always easily measurable in quantitative terms. The chapter therefore focuses on skills that could be evaluated in relatively more concrete ways during an assessment.
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Overview of Assessment Instruments for Twenty-First Century Skills
The adapted P21 framework of twenty-first century skills in Chap. 1 outlines three skill sets containing a total of twelve components that learners are said to need to possess. The skill sets are: learning and innovation, digital literacies, and life and career skills. The conceptual framework of the relationship between twenty-first century skills and teaching strategies (Chu et al. 2012c) shows assessment as a way of reflecting learning outcomes. Outcomes can be assessed in terms of product outcomes based on the grades of learners’ final output of their learning activities, and in terms of process outcomes, by evaluating their learning in the process and © Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2017 S.K.W. Chu et al., 21st Century Skills Development Through Inquiry-Based Learning, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-2481-8_8
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8 Assessment Instruments for Twenty-First Century Skills
interactions while completing tasks. Researchers and education practitioners make use of various tools to evaluate learning outcomes in these two aspects. The P21 report on assessment of twenty-first century skills (Honey et al. 2005) outlines the objectives that an ideal form of assessment should fulfill. Assessments should: • Measure learners’ knowledge, application and learning of twenty-first century skills, and identify where intervention is required. • Be applicable across a wide range of instructional programs. • Allow learners to demonstrate their proficiency in twenty-first century skills to educational institutions and prospective employers (Honey et al. 2005). The report acknowledges that diverse assessment tools are needed as a single assessment instrument cannot meet all these objectives. In fact,
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