3. How do we measure life skills for successful scaling? – Lessons from Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia

• In Event: Building life skills/soft skills/21st century skills at scale and sustainably in LMICs

Proposal

Building life skills (also sometimes referred to as socioemotional learning or “soft skills” development) has become a key objective within many development programs and country policy frameworks, as research highlights the impact of life skills likely to enable children to grow into independent thinkers and productive citizens, able to adapt to the needs and demands of the 21st century economy. Life skills are even more critical for girls, who often lack the information, agency and voice to negotiate with their families about important decisions around their education, careers, and future family lives. While life skills education is gaining traction nationally and internationally, it is strategic for international development organizations focused on girls’ education to have an integrated strategy for program delivery and advocacy, deeply rooted in evidence.
Yet, evidence about what life skills are most critical for successful life outcomes is still scarce. And evidence about effective strategies for building life skills is even scarcer. Given these factors, having well-tested and validated life skills assessments is especially critical so we can understand the impact of programs and create evidence focused on delivering essential life skills at scale.
This presentation will discuss an intensive, multi-country process to develop and refine a comprehensive life skills assessment. The assessment measures knowledge, attitudes and skills across a range of competencies within an overall life skills framework. The session will present baseline findings from five low- and lower-middle income countries in Asia and Africa. Extensive family and household data was collected for each baseline, providing for in-depth analysis of background characteristics and their relationship to the competencies measured by the assessment.
The presentation will also discuss lessons learned from the tool piloting process. A range of measures, both adapted from the existing psychometric literature and newly developed, have been tested in order both to contextualize the tool and process to diverse settings, and to strengthen the measurement properties of the tool, chiefly in terms of increasing reliability and validity while reducing reference and desirability biases. Techniques such as cognitive labs have greatly improved internal consistency, while triangulation of scores against other conceptually related data such as academic scores have enabled a better understanding and steady improvement of tool validity. To date over 4,000 girls across seven countries have participated in pilot testing or a baseline assessment.
The lessons learned, measurement strategies and data presented fill a critical gap in girls’ education measurement and moves us toward a robust, validated life skills assessment instrument and methodology that can be adapted and applied across contexts. These advances in measurement facilitate evidence building about the most effective programming to build the most critical life skills – evidence that is essential for integration of life skills education into government education systems at scale.

Author

• Ryan Hebert, Room to Read