Building capacity to assess and nurture adolescents' life skills in the global south: Insights from an East African initiative

• In Event: What works in adolescent skills: How evidenced, localized solutions are equipping young people with the skills that Africa needs

Proposal

Life skills and values are crucial in aiding learning and enabling individuals to make the most out of life. Research evidence indicates that values and life skills contribute to better achievement of academic learning, lead to better mental health, as well as help young people to access and retain employment.

Given these benefits, a number of countries are now seeking to intentionally develop these skills through their education systems. In East Africa, a number of countries have embraced such skills through their official curricula. Uganda’s lower secondary (and primary) curriculum emphasizes generic skills such as creative thinking, problem-solving, creativity, collaboration, communication, and digital literacy, among others, while Kenya has integrated eight values and seven core skills in its competency-based curriculum. Similarly, Tanzania’s national life skills framework identifies twelve core life skills, including creativity, negotiation, cooperation, and empathy and others that children should acquire.

While the curriculum intentions for nurturing these skills in all these countries are quite clear, they are not matched with practical strategies for teachers and educators on how to assess and develop these skills. It is assumed that once the skills are stated in the curriculum, teachers would automatically nurture them. No wonder, available evidence indicates that despite having these competencies in the official curriculum, young people are not acquiring them.

An assessment undertaken in the three East African countries in 2022 among adolescents aged 13-17 years (RELI 2023) indicates that on average, only 5% could be classified as fully proficient in problem-solving in terms of being able to recognise existence of a problem from multiple perspectives, and demonstrating that there may be multiple solutions to evaluate and select from to confront a given problem.

Similarly, while the official curriculum in all three countries underscores the importance of ICT and digital literacy, on average 31% of the assessed adolescents could do with ease, tasks that required them to use a smartphone or tablet to access the internet. And ability varied from country to country, with 50% of Kenyan adolescents being able to do so with ease compared to 17% in Uganda and 16% in Tanzania.

This paper shares what might work to support teachers and education systems to assess and nurture these skills, drawing on experiences of an East African initiative that has been collaborating with local education leaders, researchers, practitioners, and curriculum and assessment specialists to develop measures of assessing and nurturing these skills.

We specifically share three steps that are fundamental to the nurturing of the skills, irrespective of what they are, including a) contextualization to explore and understand the nature of the selected skill, b) development of conceptual structures of the target skill that would enable unpacking of the constructs associated with the skill leading to the development of assessment frameworks which identify the visible/measurable components of those elements and c) developing frameworks for assessing these skills across grades (learning progressions) to enable judgements around what counts as minimum, average or ultimate proficiency.

Author

• Mary Goretti Nakabugo, Uwezo Uganda