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Toward a comprehensive strategy for measuring life skills development: A review of three interrelated approaches

Wed, March 28, 11:30am to 1:00pm, Fiesta Inn Centro Histórico, Floor: Lobby Floor, Room B

Proposal

The importance of social and emotional learning and life skills has been recognized by a growing set of stakeholders in the international education community. The increasing centrality of these types of skills to a range of education programs makes it imperative to develop objective, reliable measures to assess adolescents’ progress in this area so we can determine which programs and which approaches are most effective.
This presentation will discuss three interrelated approaches to assessing the development of life skills among participants in a girls’ education program implemented across eight countries in Asia and Africa.
The first of these is a randomized controlled trial being conducted in 119 schools in Rajasthan, India. This evaluation uses a number of life skills measures, notably including several task-based assessments that ask girls to demonstrate the skills in question in real-world scenarios. These task-based measures include a mirror drawing exercise to measure perseverance, and a scavenger hunt game that measures creative problem solving, communication, negotiation, and other skills.
The second approach is a multi-country survey-based assessment developed through an intensive process of pilot testing and refinement. This assessment pairs self-reported Likert-scale questions with a range of techniques used to mitigate potential sources of bias. Many of the scales and constructs it employs are drawn from approaches previously validated in high-resource settings, but have been adapted through intensive pilot testing across multiple geographies. The assessment also uses lightweight tasks such as free listing, and a set of questions to assess girls’ knowledge and attitudes in several areas to determine how these relate to their skill development. One of the major challenges for this approach has been in contextualizing the survey, given the variation across cultures and languages in how some of the concepts related to SEL are understood and manifested.
Lastly, we will discuss the development and implementation of alumnae surveys that ask program graduates about their longer-term life outcomes in the areas of education, work, family, community engagement, and overall life satisfaction.
Taken together with implementation data, these diverse approaches represent a comprehensive strategy for assessing how program activities shape knowledge and attitudes, how knowledge and attitudes translate into demonstrable skills, and how these skills may lead to longer-term life outcomes in various areas. For each approach, we will discuss how measures have been developed and refined, challenges faced and lessons learned, and preliminary results.

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