Assessing 21st Century Skills

Recently, one of the teachers who is participating in our district’s 21^st Century Learning grant project came to talk with me about assessing 21 century skills – one of the expectations for teachers in this project. Her observation was that students frequently practice the skills when engaged in research or project based learning.  The thing she was struggling, with, though, was how to “grade it.”

Assessing skills like collaboration, information literacy, creativity, self-direction, and critical thinking seems like a difficult task–when you think of assessment as “grading.”  To understand what is meant by assessment of 21^st century skills we need to examine the term “assessment.”  At its core, assessment should be thought of as an opportunity to give feedback. Without giving students specific, targeted feedback on how they are performing these skills, students will have little opportunity to understand how to improve their level of creativity, become better researchers through increased information literacy skills, become better at collaborating with groups for project creation and problem solving, or develop good habits of mind to become self-directed learners.  Feedback is critical to help students improve.  Another essential element is to design learning that gives students authentic opportunities to practice the skills.

So to effectively assess skills and habits of mind –we must design a performance task for the students. An assessment director in my school district once said, “If you want to assess if a student can play basketball, you don’t give him a multiple choice test!”  How valid would a multiple choice test be in telling us if the student could pull together all of his knowledge and skill, to actually collaborate with his teammates and perform during a live game with an audience? If you’re thinking multiple choice tests won’t work in the basketball scenario –then you also need to think again about what assessment of 21^st century skills should look like.

One of the most difficult tasks of designing an effective formative assessment tool for 21^st century skills is deciding what criteria should be included. The criteria should be descriptive enough to provide guidance to students of things they can do to improve that particular skill.   For example, if you were trying to put in kid friendly language a formative assessment tool of the 21^st century skill of creativity, we need to think about what processes and habits of mind contribute to being creative.

These items become the criteria upon which a rubric or checklist can be built. As you can see, these items are not necessarily things that you can assess in one project. Additionally, they might be best used in self-evaluation, followed up with conferencing for an opportunity to give more in-depth verbal feedback.

Another great strategy for building a formative assessment of 21^st century skills is to seek input from the students.  Brainstorm as a class what they think contributes to increased creativity, self-direction, collaboration, etc.

There are many excellent resources available via the Web to begin the process of creating a formative assessment tool for a particular skill. My favorite is the Intel Assessing Projects Database.  (click on “workspace” to create a free account – then explore the library of hundreds of formative assessment tools for 21^st century skills!) I have also assembled several formative assessment tools of the 21^st century skills on my wiki which you are welcome to access and use.

Additionally, below you will find my slides from a workshop I have created on assessing 21^st century skills.