How do we know if our students are gaining the skills they need to be successful in the 21st century?
One of the biggest challenges that education still faces is the assessment of students’ skills, especially 21st century skills like critical thinking, collaboration, problem solving, digital literacy and social networking.
To help answer this need, the Assessment and Teaching of 21st-Century Skills (ATC21S) global research partnership founded by Intel, Cisco and Microsoft has today launched its cloud-based system to help teachers teach collaborative problem solving and ICT digital literacy skills.
As a multinational effort the project is a first step in applying common standards, assessments and terminologies of 21st century skills around the world. The classroom tasks have been designed to help government policy-makers, teachers and academic institutions prepare students with 21st century skills, not only for academic success, but also for success in the workplace and in life.
With PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) announcing earlier this year its ambition to assess collaborative problem solving skills as art of the curriculum by 2015, the ATC21S system offers a stepping stone toward this goal. Andreas Schleicher, the Special Advisor on Education Policy to the Secretary-General and Head of the Indicators and Analysis Division at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) said:
ATC21S has played an essential pathfinder role to move the assessment agenda forward. It fills a critical gap between existing basic research on assessment design and methodologies, on the one hand, and the implementation of large-scale assessments that provide reliable data at reasonable cost, on the other. Its latest venture, the piloting of tasks to assess collaborative problem-solving skills, provides important insights for OECD’s efforts to broaden future PISA assessments to encompass interpersonal skill dimensions.
The official launch will take place today in the Mauritzsaal Theatre at the Koninklijk Instituut van de Tropen (Royal Tropical Institute) in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. More information about the launch can be found the ATC21S website: http://atc21s.org/.