Representation and Assessment of 21st-Century Skills

• In Event: New International Developments and Cross-Validation in Constructive Knowledge Assessment and Rerepresentation

Abstract

The goal of this presentation is to report on a theoretical model arising from the use of qualitative and/or quantitative approaches to both identify 21st Century Skills and how to assess their impact on learning. We selected components for our model that are sensitive to instruction, permit cost-effective measurement, and overlap with other concepts and constructs only minimally.
21st Century Skills are the mental preparation (including knowledge, skills, and attributes) an individual needs to establish and sustain competent performance in a complex and unpredictable environment. They enable one to perform successfully in environments that are unexpected, never before encounters, dynamic, open-ended, ill-defined and high stakes.
Global competition, new production techniques, and rapid technological change have placed a premium on human creativity and innovation. Organizations have found that success requires shifting from routine and highly scripted jobs to adapting the knowledge, skills, and abilities of people to evolving demands. Perhaps the most valuable competency for today’s workforce is the ability to adapt, to transfer learning from one system or scenario to another without formal retraining.
We view 21st Century Skills through a knowledge, skills, and attributes (KSA) lens, i.e., knowledge is domain-specific, skills are either domain-specific or domain-independent, but attributes are relatively domain-independent. The knowledge construct includes domain-specific knowledge for developing 21st Century Skills in a specific domains as well as what are the pre-requisite skills required. There are five skills: adaptability, adaptive problem-solving, communication, decision-making, and situation awareness. There are four competencies or attributes, i.e., adaptive expertise, creative thinking, metacognition, and teamwork.
For example, in order to respond effectively to a typical medical emergency, one would need specialized knowledge of medical diagnosis and treatment, as well as the specific skills to conduct such a diagnosis. The skills provide the domain-specific strategies needed to execute a set of task specific decisions and actions. The attribute might be in a medical crisis to generate a creative solution.
There are multiple ways of assessing 21st Century Skills. For example, one could assess the value(s) of teaching such attributes by examining learners’ ability to solve criterion problems of varying complexity and varying conditions of stress, apply declarative and procedural knowledge to untaught problems, produce self-reports, or perform successfully on challenging computer simulations when the procedure that was learned to solve the problem would lead to disastrous results. Then one must create a new procedure. Evaluation questions to be answered about 21st Century Skills should concern the four levels of Kirkpatrick’s 1994 summative framework.
We will also report the results of a completed study that we investigated in a Navy simulation environment, measuring the following 21st Century Skills: adaptive problem-solving, metacognition, creativity, and teamwork.

Authors

• Harold O'Neil, University of Southern California

• Donna Ayala, University of Southern California