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Session Submission Summary

The factors and community inputs that influence policy, practice, and measurement of life skills in East Africa and India

Sun, February 19, 9:45 to 11:15am EST (9:45 to 11:15am EST), Grand Hyatt Washington, Floor: Constitution Level (3B), Constitution D

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Today, education systems across the globe have evolved from being teacher centred to being more learner centred – approaches that view learners as active agents in the teaching and learning process (Garrett, 2008). This has led to a drastic shift not only in curricular design and pedagogical approaches but also in the assessment process. In East Africa, particularly, the education system has been transformed and new curricula have been designed to include life skills and values, or what many refer to as core-competencies or 21st century skills. Unfortunately, the change has been so drastic that the implementation has faced many challenges such as lack of prepared teachers to handle the changes, lack of assessment tools to measure progress, and lack of good will from parents to support the changes. In support of this new challenge and in the spirit of public private partnership, a group of 25 civil society organizations working in the education space and more so, in the field of values and life skills, came together to develop assessment tools to support in measuring the progress made in the acquisition of these fundamental competences. These organizations under the Regional Education Learning Initiative (RELI) sought to understand values and life skills in the local context, measure values and life skills, and lastly develop and pilot models of developing life skills and nurturing values. In 2020, the RELI member organizations commenced the initiative dubbed Assessment of Life skills and Values in East Africa (ALiVE) to develop contextualized tools for the assessment of life skills and values for adolescents aged 13 to 17 years, in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. The RELI members in collaboration with the Ministries of Education in each country, in particular the curriculum design officers, the assessment development officers, teacher training officers, and other stakeholders, including teachers, artists, and researchers from the universities worked with an external facilitator for over 34 weeks to develop scenario-based tasks and items for the assessment of three life skills (problem solving, self-awareness and collaboration) and one value (respect). The tool development followed a rigorous process that included the following aspects: setting the scope - to understand the nature of the target life skills and values, and to define, and deconstruct the target skills; development of tasks and items - generation of context relevant tasks and items for measuring the target skills; development of scoring rubrics and think aloud sessions - to check whether the drafted assessment tasks actually capture the intended competencies; pilot testing of the draft assessment tools; and review of pilot test data to finalize the assessment materials. The assessment tools have been used to assess over 30,000 adolescents, aged 13 to 17 years, in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania.

Lasting the full duration of 90 minutes, the panel hopes to achieve four objectives:
1. Share findings from the assessment conducted in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania.
2. Share experiences of using scenarios as an approach to the assessment of life skills and values.
3. Share data collected from 30,000 education stakeholders on their understanding of life skills and values in another context, India.
4. Receive feedback from participants and generate ideas of amplifying the voices of the global south on the importance of assessing life skills and values.

Paper one presents the proficiency levels of the adolescents together with characterization of the levels of proficiency through descriptive statements of what the adolescents are able to demonstrate. The paper will also present factors that catalyse or inhibit the acquisition of life skills and values. The factors considered include age, gender, parents and/or caregiver level of education, the school status of the adolescents, household wealth, and location (urban or rural).

Paper two shares lessons and challenges of using scenario-based tasks in assessing life skills and values, an assessment approach where the assessors present a contextualized and age-appropriate short story/scenario to the adolescent and asks him/her to respond to a predefined set of items related to the skills’ structure. This model was chosen by the ALiVE team as an approach that would minimize social desirability bias.

Paper three presents the process of measuring collaboration and the findings from 10,000 adolescents across 2,500 groups. We will elaborate on the assessment findings, highlighting the achievement levels among adolescents in the three countries (Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania.

The fourth paper presents insights and findings from voices of 30,000 stakeholders which include young people (11–22 year-old), parents, school teachers and ITI/VTI trainers across 11 states in India. This is from Year 1 of a 3 Year study which aims to reach 200,000 stakeholders by December 2023. Led by the work of the Life Skills Collaborative (LSC), the survey focuses on how adolescents, young people, teachers, and parents across different social, gender, and geographical contexts in India understand and describe life skills. It also focuses on what life skills these stakeholders consider important to succeed in life.

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