Technology Based Assessments For 21st Century Skills

Creative problem solving, collaboration, and technology fluency are core skills requisite of any nation’s workforce that strives to be competitive in the 21st Century. Teaching these types of skills is an economic imperative, and assessment is a fundamental component of any pedagogical program. Yet, measurement of these skills is complex due to the interacting factors associated with higher order thinking and multifaceted communication. Advances in assessment theory, educational psychology, and technology create an opportunity to innovate new methods of measuring students’ 21st Century Skills with validity, reliability, and scalability. In this book, leading scholars from multiple disciplines present their latest research on how to best measure complex knowledge, skills, and abilities using technology-based assessments. All authors discuss theoretical and practical implications from their research and outline their visions for the future of technology-based assessments.

Go beyond traditional paper-and-pencil tests! This book provides a framework and practical ideas for assessing 21st century skills such as problem solving, collaboration, and creativity.

This second volume of papers from the ATC21STM project deals with the development of an assessment and teaching system of 21st century skills. Readers are guided through a detailed description of the methods used in this process. The first volume was published by Springer in 2012 (Griffin, P., McGaw, B. & Care, E., Eds., Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills, Dordrecht: Springer). The major elements of this new volume are the identification and description of two 21st century skills that are amenable to teaching and learning: collaborative problem solving, and learning in digital networks. Features of the skills that need to be mirrored in their assessment are identified so that they can be reflected in assessment tasks. The tasks are formulated so that reporting of student performance can guide implementation in the classroom for use in teaching and learning. How simple tasks can act as platforms for development of 21st century skills is demonstrated, with the concurrent technical infrastructure required for its support. How countries with different languages and cultures participated and contributed to the development process is described. The psychometric qualities of the online tasks developed are reported, in the context of the robustness of the automated scoring processes. Finally, technical and educational issues to be resolved in global projects of this nature are outlined.

This book provides a detailed description of research and application outcomes from the Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills project, which explored a framework for understanding the nature of these skills. The major element of this new volume is the presentation of research information from the global assessment of two 21st century skills that are amenable to teaching and learning: collaborative problem solving, and learning in digital networks. The outcomes presented include evidence to support the validity of assessment of 21st century skills and descriptions of consequent pedagogical approaches which can be used both to teach the skills and to use them to enhance key learning goals in secondary education systems. The sections of the volume are connected through a focus on the degree to which innovative assessment tasks measure the constructs of interest. This focus is informed by conceptual and methodological issues associated with affordances of 21st century computer-based assessment. How understanding of the nature of the skills, as derived from these assessments, can guide approaches to the integration of 21st century skills in the classroom, is informed by initiatives adopted by participating countries. The guiding questions in this volume are: "Do the assessment tasks measure the constructs?" and "What are the implications for assessment and teaching in the classroom?" It is the third volume of papers from this project published by Springer.

The routine jobs of yesterday are being replaced by technology and/or shipped off-shore. In their place, job categories that require knowledge management, abstract reasoning, and personal services seem to be growing. The modern workplace requires workers to have broad cognitive and affective skills. Often referred to as "21st century skills," these skills include being able to solve complex problems, to think critically about tasks, to effectively communicate with people from a variety of different cultures and using a variety of different techniques, to work in collaboration with others, to adapt to rapidly changing environments and conditions for performing tasks, to effectively manage one's work, and to acquire new skills and information on one's own. The National Research Council (NRC) has convened two prior workshops on the topic of 21st century skills. The first, held in 2007, was designed to examine research on the skills required for the 21st century workplace and the extent to which they are meaningfully different from earlier eras and require corresponding changes in educational experiences. The second workshop, held in 2009, was designed to explore demand for these types of skills, consider intersections between science education reform goals and 21st century skills, examine models of high-quality science instruction that may develop the skills, and consider science teacher readiness for 21st century skills. The third workshop was intended to delve more deeply into the topic of assessment. The goal for this workshop was to capitalize on the prior efforts and explore strategies for assessing the five skills identified earlier. The Committee on the Assessment of 21st Century Skills was asked to organize a workshop that reviewed the assessments and related research for each of the five skills identified at the previous workshops, with special attention to recent developments in technology-enabled assessment of critical thinking and problem-solving skills. In designing the workshop, the committee collapsed the five skills into three broad clusters as shown below: Cognitive skills: nonroutine problem solving, critical thinking, systems thinking Interpersonal skills: complex communication, social skills, team-work, cultural sensitivity, dealing with diversity Intrapersonal skills: self-management, time management, self-development, self-regulation, adaptability, executive functioning Assessing 21st Century Skills provides an integrated summary of the presentations and discussions from both parts of the third workshop.

An emerging body of research suggests that a set of broad "21st century skills"-such as adaptability, complex communication skills, and the ability to solve non-routine problems-are valuable across a wide range of jobs in the national economy. However, the role of K-12 education in helping students learn these skills is a subject of current debate. Some business and education groups have advocated infusing 21st century skills into the school curriculum, and several states have launched such efforts. Other observers argue that focusing on skills detracts attention from learning of important content knowledge. To explore these issues, the National Research Council conducted a workshop, summarized in this volume, on science education as a context for development of 21st century skills. Science is seen as a promising context because it is not only a body of accepted knowledge, but also involves processes that lead to this knowledge. Engaging students in scientific processes-including talk and argument, modeling and representation, and learning from investigations-builds science proficiency. At the same time, this engagement may develop 21st century skills. Exploring the Intersection of Science Education and 21st Century Skills addresses key questions about the overlap between 21st century skills and scientific content and knowledge; explores promising models or approaches for teaching these abilities; and reviews the evidence about the transferability of these skills to real workplace applications.

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Assessment has provided educational institutions with information about student learning outcomes and the quality of education for many decades. But has it informed practice and been fully incorporated into the learning cycle? Conrad and Openo argue that the potential inherent in many of the new learning environments being explored by educators and students has not been fully realized. In this investigation of a variety of assessment methods and learning approaches, the authors aim to discover the tools that engage learners and authentically evaluate education. They insist that moving to new learning environments, specifically those online and at a distance, afford opportunities for educators to adopt only the best practices of traditional face-to-face assessment while exploring evaluation tools made available by a digital learning environment in the hopes of arriving at methods that capture the widest set of learner skills and attributes.