Using evidence on 21st century skills to inspire practice: Findings from the Assessment of Life Skills and Values in East Africa

• In Event: Soft Skills Measurement and Tool Development in East Africa

Proposal

The world is concerned about young people’s preparedness to face challenges in the workplace, as well as society’s ability to respond to the social and economic issues of the 21st century. To respond to this challenge in the past decade, the education systems in East Africa have incorporated life skills and values into their policies and curricula; however, the actual implementation and incorporation of teaching and learning practices that foster these skills in the classroom is mostly unexplored. It has also been noted that tools used to measure 21st century skills in non-Western contexts have been borrowed from Western literature. This leaves no room for different understandings and conceptualizations of the skills to be measured. The Assessment of Life Skills and Values in East Africa (ALiVE) team addressed the gap in existing literature by exploring the understanding of collaboration, problem solving, self-awareness, and respect in the East African context through rapid ethnographic interviews. Next, ALiVE developed a valid and reliable contextualized tool that had the capacity to assess the proficiencies in these skills of adolescents in East Africa through a household-based approach. The assessment involved 45,442 in and out of school adolescents aged 13 to 17 years, across Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda. The patterns of results are uniformly similar across each of the education systems, although there are some slight differences in levels of proficiencies. In addition to the assessment of the three life skills and value, ALiVE considered assessment of the oral reading and comprehension, and digital literacy. Adolescents were asked to read as fluently as they could from a short text that was extracted from the Uwezo Beyond Basics Literacy Assessment, targeted towards the Primary 4 standard. Assessors followed the reading process of the adolescents in order to ascertain whether they were; reading sentences as a string of words; stopping or hesitating while reading; omitting or skipping reading some words or sounds; or replacing words or sounds that they were unable to read. Adolescents who did not experience any of the presented situations were categorized as ‘fluent’ readers. For the digital literacy component, adolescents were given a smartphone or tablet in the assessment session and was asked to access the internet and visit their favourite website. In case of no connectivity, assessors observed and noted whether the adolescent was able to locate an app or click on it.

The results indicate that there is a strong association between adolescents’ life skills and values, and their reading and digital literacy proficiencies. This presentation will therefore share the evidence of the association between the basic literacy proficiency of adolescents and their proficiencies in the various skills and value. Similarly, adolescents’ ability to use technology and the association between their proficiency in digital literacy and the life skills and value are also presented.

Authors

• Purity Ngina, Zizi Afrique Foundation

• Martin Ariapa, Luigi Giussani Institute of Higher Education

• Mauro Giacomazzi, Luigi Giussani Institute of Higher Education