Assessing 21st century skills

–There continues to be major international comparisons in the achievement of students in key subjects such as Literacy, Maths and Science levels, but now Dr Esther Care – an Associate Professor of Educational Psychology at the Assessment Research Centre, University of Melbourne, Australia – is exploring an international project to assess new competencies relevant for the 21st century.

Dr Care notes…

Governments value student assessment results as a tangible indication of the effectiveness of government policy. This means that results have to keep improving. So the government places increasing pressure on schools and teachers to meet this requirement. Teachers and students also value this improvement, so efforts are turned to studies that will provide evidence for the improvement required by government. There are obviously undesirable and negative consequences of such an approach, as has been seen in several countries such as Australia, the US, and Canada. Even so, we took the view that this strategy could be used for good, and that a global assessment initiative would stimulate the introduction of enabling skills other than literacy and numeracy into the classroom.

ATC21S™ is not concerned with global standards or relative national rankings; it is concerned with making 21st century skills explicit in order to provide teachers with information that will guide their teaching of them. For further details of the initiative, visit the ATCS™ website here.

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