Measuring the Unmeasurable Factors that Lead Youth to Success in School and at Work: Innovations and Challenges from Uganda

Group Submission Type: Panel Session

Proposal

In the field of international education, there has long been the recognition that success in the classroom and in life results from a combination of factors that go well beyond cognitive skills and aptitude of the student. Education psychologists and economists in the United States and other developed countries have established the link between non-cognitive skills, or “soft skills” and school performance (Wolfe and Johhnson, 1995; Duckworth and Seligman, 2005).

Soft skills refer to a broad set of skills, competencies, behaviours, attitudes, and personal qualities that enable people to effectively navigate their environment, work well with others, perform well, and achieve their goals. These skills are broadly applicable and complement the hard skills which mainly are technical, vocational, and academic skills. (Lippman, Ryberg, Carney et al, 2015)

These soft skills and related behaviors influence the outcomes of education systems and interventions, yet are very difficult to measure and track over time. In recent years, donors such as USAID and a wide range of implementing partners have begun to tackle and unpack what we know about the soft skills that contribute to positive outcomes for youth across different important areas of life including workforce success, violence prevention and sexual and reproductive health. (Gates et al., 2016) While just a few years ago, there was a dearth of measurement and testing in developing countries, including Sub-Saharan Africa, today many researchers and implementers are investing in the development of appropriate, adapted and useful frameworks and measurement tools.

Measuring student’s mastery of these skills is crucial for schools and teachers to assess learners’ progress, as well as for governments and policymakers to design and improve effective curriculum. Yet, these soft skills were for long considered “unmeasurable”.

Donors, implementers and researchers are eager for the opportunity to engage with others who are tackling similar issues, to be challenged by different approaches, to find synergies and areas of common interest, and to get feedback on the attempts being tried.

We are proposing a panel session that will focus in on one country, Uganda, and the emerging innovations in soft skill assessments aimed towards different levels of the education- workforce system or continuum. The panel brings together a diverse set of experiences coming from two education implementers, a research and evaluation firm, the government’s Ministry of Education, and a donor.

By focusing on the innovations emerging in Uganda, this panel will contribute to the CIES 2018 conference theme, “Re-mapping global education, south-north dialogue”.

Specifically, our panel has three key objectives, which are to:
1- Encourage the development of more and better tools for measurement of soft, non-cognitive skills in the field of youth development broadly, including education;
2- Share experiences with concrete tools, including details about their development, testing, and early application; and
3- Openly discuss the challenges, pitfalls and downsides of the tools for a realistic discussion of areas needing more work.

Sub Unit

• SIG: Youth Development and Education

Chair

• Nancy Taggart, US Agency for International Development (USAID)

Individual Presentations

• Introduction and recent research from the USAID Office of Education - Nancy Taggart, US Agency for International Development (USAID)

• Innovations in testing of soft skills in Ugandan secondary schools: Implications for teacher training and student assessment - John Mary Vianney Mitana, Luigi Giussani Institute of Higher Education

• From design to testing to implementation: A wide-lens look at a new soft skills measurement tool - Sarah Gates, FHI 360; Meghan Mahoney, Educate!; Carina Omoeva, FHI 360

• Implications of soft skills assessment for national examinations in Uganda - Odongo Nokrach, Ugandan National Examination Board

Discussant

• Nancy Taggart, US Agency for International Development (USAID)