Workshop on Assessment of 21st Century Skills

The National Research Council's (NRC) Board on Testing and Assessment proposes a two-day workshop on assessing 21st century skills building on two previous workshops. The first workshop explored employer demand for employees who possess these broad transferable skills, which were defined as adaptability, complex communication, non-routine problem solving, self-management/self-development and systems thinking. The second workshop considered the intersection between science education reform goals and the 21st century skills, examined models of high quality science instruction that may develop the skills and discussed teacher readiness to integrate the skills in instruction. Both workshops expressed the need for assessments that can measure the attainment of 21st century skills. This workshop is to describe research on assessment of 21st century skills to inform policies and practices. The workshop is lead by an expert in assessment and convenes an expert committee of educational measurement specialists, cognitive psychologists and experts in job analysis and employment testing along with practitioners in schools. The committee investigates the types of assessments available and associated technical reports and designs the workshop to review them. Knowledgeable experts are commissioned to write papers and speak at the workshop. An individual author writes a summary report to be disseminated by the NRC. In the second year the NRC reconvenes the leadership of all three workshops to identify the next steps to provide research-based guidance to educational leaders seeking to infuse 21st century skills into instruction.