Project Goals:

The goal of this project was to initiate an effort to validate measures and interventions associated with the development of professional or 21st century skills aligned with worker competencies that cut across technician education.  To accomplish this goal a diverse collaboration of 25 researchers, academics and industry experts were convened in a F2F meeting in conjunction with the 2017 High-Tech Conference in Salt Lake City.  Numerous conference calls preceded the meeting in preparation of the agenda.

The specific objectives were to:

1. establish a community college-industry collaboration capable of validating 21st Century skills measures and interventions in technician training

2. articulate fundable and executable proposal ideas that could address the intellectual gaps in 21st Century technician skills research and practice

3. engage a greater number of industry and community college members in a broader understanding and discussion of how to successfully endow future technicians with improved 21st Century skills.  

Approximately 24 individuals representing 8 community colleges, 11 disseminators/evaluators, and 5 companies attended the meeting. As a direct result of the meeting two proposals are in preparation for Oct 2017 submission to the National Science Foundation’s NSF-ATE program, both in the Targeted Research on Technician Education track.

Intellectual Merit

New social and scientific networks were created.  For example, three participants, all from Washington State but none of whom had ever met, realized their common interest and prepared one of the proposals together.  About half the participants in the other proposal had also never met before the July 18 meeting.  This core working group will be reinforced at the forthcoming ATE PI Conference in October 2017.

 A new process for preparing collaborative scientific proposals was attempted and mostly succeeded.  In this process, mini-proposals are first put forth anonymously by community members, commented on publicly by community members (comments are attributable), and then left open for individuals to bid to work on.  This process had the desired effect of breaking up and rearranging social networks to form proposal teams, while simultaneously allowing for the sharing of a great deal of hard-won expertise across the community during the proposal gestation process.  It remains to be seen whether this process resulted in higher quality proposals with a higher-than-average success rate.

 As a result of individuals networking in the broader Hi-TEC meeting, additional members were incorporated into the collaboration and are expected to contribute in the next round of the collaboration’s activities.

The emerging 21st Century Skills collaboration applied for meeting session slots during the NSF-ATE October meeting to continue its work and work on Birds of a Feather sessions.

Broader Impact

A collaboration (of community college faculty and industry supervisors) and accompanying test bed (of students and employees) are now available for validating 21st Century skills measures.  The new capability allows concrete measures of 21st Century technician skills to be compared and harmonized across industry and academia; it also allows researchers to determine which academic interventions affect students beyond the classroom and into their first years on the job.  If its first projects are successfully funded, the collaboration’s test bed should start producing results in early 2019.

Because 21st Century skills are nearly universally required in all jobs, the results of proposals prepared by the collaboration should apply, to a fair extent, to nearly all occupations. 

Better measures of, and training practices in, 21st century skills should result in future generations of technicians being able to handle job responsibilities more capably than if they had received training limited to only subject matter knowledge. 

Last Modified: 08/14/2017
Modified by: Phillip Davis