EDUC 7724 Assessing 21st Century Skills Reflection

Each week I find more and more useful and applicable information as I continue on my journey through my IT&DML courses.  For my EDUC 7724 course this week, we looked at assessing 21st century skills.  Since we as teacher are teaching 21st century learners, we should have a good idea as to what and how we should be assessing the skills they need in order to succeed in today's society.

The 21st century skills that were discussed this week included critical thinking, leadership, creativity, work ethic, problem solving, meta cognition, technology skills, collaboration, global understanding, and digital literacy.  The materials that our instructor provided to us included infographics, cartoons, and videos which focused on some of these areas of skill.  We were then asked to compare the importance of learning to the ease of assessment of each of these skills.  The following screenshot was taken of my rankings for the different skills:

I have to admit I had a hard time completing this activity.  I wanted to put everything on the more and harder end of the graph.  There were a few areas that I thought may not be as difficult to assess such as technology skills, but I think I have this thought because of the amount of information I have received from the IT&DML courses.  I see some of the others ares as harder skills to assess because we as educators are just being to implement project based learning and curriculum that require our students to demonstrate critical thinking to a level that they have never been asked to do before.

My classmates completed the same activity and it was interesting to see where they placed the different skills compared to my graph.  We all seem to be under the same impression that there are no 21st century skills that are least important to learning and easy to assess.  Critical thinking was ranked pretty high on the importance of learning and ease of assessment on most of our graphs.  This week's activities and materials had me rethinking not only my own class lessons and how I incorporate the 21st century skills into the lessons, but also how assess those skills.  There is much work to be done on my part to make sure I am doing everything I can to prepare my 21st century learners and to make sure I am correctly assessing the skills that they need.