21st Century Skills – What we measure

This 21st Century Skills Education & Competitiveness- provides guidelines on:

What We Need to Do Now

The nation needs to do a much better job teaching and measuring advanced, 21st century skills that are the indispensible currency for participation, achievement and competitiveness in the global economy.

Beyond the assessment of reading, mathematics and science, the United States does not assess other essential skills that are in demand in the 21st century. All Americans, not just an elite few, need 21st century skills that will increase their marketability, employability and readiness for citizenship, such as:

•Thinking critically and making judgments

•Solving complex, multidisciplinary, open-ended problems

•Creativity and entrepreneurial thinking

•Communicating and collaborating

•Making innovative use of knowledge, information and opportunities

•Taking charge of financial, health and civic responsibilities

In Doug Noon What We Measure, Rotherham says,

There are also real technical and logistical challenges the movement must overcome. Outside of intensive writing assignments, measuring many of these skills in a large scale or standardized way is difficult. As my colleague Elena Silva described in a recent analysis it is possible to design assessments that test both content and skills like critical thinking or problem solving. But unless these measurements are carefully designed, students can fake knowledge on many exercises intended to measure skills, again shortchanging content. In any case, most states are ill-equipped to implement such assessments today and too many teachers are not prepared to use them or teach this way today.

In other words, we should not teach what we can not easily measure. To argue that we should not teach higher level thinking because our tests are inadequate and teachers lack preparation is advocacy for the status quo – a declining spiral of testable mediocrity and irrelevance.

Well, here’s some news: We already measure many sad truths kids are learning, We count high school dropouts, teen pregnancies, drug arrests, incarceration rates, mean family incomes, child welfare statistics, and a host of other social dissonance indicators. And all of them indicate there is a problem outside the schoolhouse. And there is NO evidence that a steady diet of testable basic skills, disconnected from any reality in the known universe outside the sterile confines of an education policy think tank, will have any impact on THOSE statistics.

However, can we assess what learners have learnt instead?  Nearly all the 21st century skills could be learnt through problem-based or project-based learning (with the use of blogs, wikis/nings or social network tools such as Youtube and Facebook) and life experience.  With the advent of open sourced technologies (Web 2.0 tools), mobile technology, internet based learning, and the support of  enthusiastic and trained educators, it is possible to supplement the formal education with informal learning, leading to advancement of skills amongst the learners.

Instead of having standardised tests, are there better alternative assessments that could be used?  How about the e-portfolios, wiki-based projects, independent blogs and edublogs, and videos/podcast as alternative means of technology mediated education/learning especially in the senior years of study?

Postscript: This paper by Jay Mathews provides further reading on the 21st century skills.

Great educators tell me that teaching and learning are more about relationships than content, more about asking questions every day of everyone in class than depending on students to soak it up on their own. In our poorest neighborhoods, we still have some of our weakest teachers, either too inexperienced to handle methods like modeling instruction or too cynical to consider 21st-century skills anything more than another doomed fad. There might be a way to turn them around, but if there isn’t, instead of engaged and inspired students, we will have just one more big waste of time.