Deep Dive: 21st Century Skills
Outcomes in informal STEM learning can range from affective outcomes (think: feelings, attitudes, emotions), behavioral outcomes, content knowledge changes, skill development, and more. One common construct we see in our work is 21st century skills. Here, we’ll do a deep dive into what this concept is, how it might be incorporated into your program outcomes, and how evaluators think about assessing it.
What are 21st century skills?
When you think of “21st century skills,” what comes to mind? Technological literacy? Critical thinking? Perhaps even coding skills? Well, I have one thing to say to that - YES.
The term 21st century skills has been defined as highlighting “the shift from a more structured 20th century basic skills economy to a fragmented 21st century high skilled economy.” In other words, these are the skills that “all youth and adults must [...] in order to access higher quality education and career opportunities” (MHA Labs).
According to the Center for the Advancement of Informal Science Education (CAISE),
“Twenty-first century skills constitute a wide range of skills vital for preparing today’s young people to enter the 21st century STEM workforce and important for all people to engage in a 21st century world.”
MHA Labs, a community collaboration out of Chicago that has done foundational work with 21st Century Skills, notes that “Practitioners, researchers and policymakers have yet to agree on a term to encompass this range of intrapersonal, interpersonal and cognitive skills.” So, 21st century skills it is!
While there is no agreed-upon standard for 21st century skills, both MHA Labs and the Partnership for 21st Century Learning are widely respected. Different models contain slight differences in their structure and articulation of the skills but are largely centered around social, emotional, and cognitive skills.
The Partnership for 21st Century Learning organizes 21st Century Skills under four sections: key subject and 21st century themes; learning and innovation skills; information, media, and technology skills; and life and career skills.
MHA Labs developed a set of 35 skills nested under the following six building blocks:
Personal mindset
Planning for success
Social awareness
Verbal communication
Collaboration
Problem Solving
Let’s explore one of these to understand the skills that constitute a building block. As an example, let’s look at “Problem Solving.” The six skills nested under this building block include:
Defines problems by considering all potential parts and related causes.
Gathers and organizes relevant information about a problem from multiple sources.
Generates potential solutions to a problem, seeking and leveraging diverse perspectives.
Identifies alternative ideas/processes that are more effective than the ones previously used/suggested.
Evaluates the advantages and disadvantages associated with each potential solution identified for a problem.
Selects and implements best solution based on evaluation of advantages and disadvantages of each potential solution.
Check out the MHA Steps Poster to learn about how the collaboration examined their existing skills for cultural bias, to remove or rewrite elements that are cultural norms (but not universal skills). A subset of the skills remained after this process where they brought in a cultural anthropologist and linguist to eliminate class, racial, gender, and other cultural biases. Find more resources on 21st Century Skills from MHA Labs on their website.
It’s important to note that 21st century skills can be used for program development as well as evaluation purposes. For example, you might develop a youth-serving program that aims to build various social, emotional, and cognitive skills in youth. To do so, you might use the 21st century skills as a framework for devising curricula with learning outcomes related to these skills. For evaluation purposes, these skills can be isolated and assessed in learners. Let’s consider one of the “Problem Solving” skills as an example here.
How can we measure 21st century skills?
Perhaps we’re interested in understanding if our program is having success with this skill: “Generates potential solutions to a problem, seeking and leveraging diverse perspectives.”
We might develop an observation rubric to go along with an activity, where an educator can observe group work to see the extent to which students are generating multiple solutions to a problem, as well as seeking and leveraging diverse perspectives. Maybe the students are ensuring all group members have a say in the solution brainstorming. Or maybe the students are seeking perspectives even outside of their team - with other students, their parents, educators, or others in the community - to incorporate even more perspectives.
We might also consider asking the students about the experience with questions like “Did you feel your perspective was heard when you were generating potential solutions in your group? Why or why not?” and “Did you feel that the perspectives of others were heard? Why or why not?”
Or maybe we even look longitudinally - perhaps with a pre/post-instrument to see what the students think about generating solutions and including multiple perspectives before and after the program. Did the program have an effect on their perceptions of these skills?
Self-report surveys and observations are two common ways to measure 21st century skills. But, there are a lack of valid instruments to collect data on informal STEM learning or out-of-school learning in regards to 21st century skills. Existing instruments may have been tested in formal learning environments, with adults (say in a workplace environment), or inadequately validated. (Grack Nelson, 2017).
Sondergeld and Johnson (2019) created the 21st Century Skills Assessment to fill this gap. This assessment uses observations to gauge student development across six learning domains: creativity and innovation; critical thinking and problem solving; communication, collaboration, social and cross-cultural skills; information, media, and technological literacy; flexibility, adaptability, initiative, and self-direction; and productivity, accountability, leadership, and responsibility.
Of course, most evaluators will choose to design for the specific program they’re evaluating, taking into account the audience(s), context, history, and timeframe, along with other key factors. That’s why it is so important to think critically about your evaluation practice instead of just “copying and pasting” an existing instrument.
Now that you’ve learned a little more about 21st century skills, I’m curious - can you see yourself using these skills in your program or evaluation work?
References:
Grack Nelson, Amy Lynn (2017). Development and validation of a survey to measure perceived team communication skills in middle and high school STEM out-of-school time programs. (Publication No. 10689783). [Doctoral dissertation, University of Minnesota]. ProQuest LLC.
Sondergeld, T. A., & Johnson, C. C. (2019). Development and validation of a 21st Century Skills Assessment: Using an interactive multimethod approach. School Science and Mathematics, 119: 312-326.
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