Professional Documents
Culture Documents
21st Century Skills Assessment
21st Century Skills Assessment
Over the past two decades, assessment has played a central role in education
policy in the United States, as it has in other countries for many decades. Large-
scale, summative assessments, for example, are viewed as powerful levers for
influencing what happens in schools and classrooms, and as such, assessment
studies are routinely carried out to gauge the strengths and weaknesses of
students. Furthermore, with the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001,
testing has become not only more routine but also increasingly influential and
focused on core content domains. Results from large-scale summative
assessments, along with other measures of achievement, are regularly used to
determine whether students can advance to the next grade, and to judge the
quality of schools and the educators who work in them.
In recent years, educators, business leaders, and policymakers in the U.S. have
questioned whether the current design of assessment systems focuses too much on
measuring students’ ability to recall discrete facts using multiple choice tests at the
cost of not adequately measuring a student’s ability to engage in and complete
complex thinking and problem-solving tasks. Outside observers of the U.S. school
system have been quick to note potential shortcomings, claiming that narrowly
focused high-stakes assessment systems produce at best only illusory student gains
(Ridgeway, McCusker and Pead 2004). The end result is a widening gap between
the knowledge and skills students are acquiring in schools and the knowledge and
skills needed to succeed in the increasingly global, technology-infused 21st century
workplace. While the current assessment landscape is replete with assessments
that measure knowledge of core content areas such as language arts, mathematics,
science and social studies, there is a comparative lack of assessments and analyses
focused on 21st century skills. Current tests fall short in several key ways:
• The tests are not designed to gauge how well students apply what they know
to new situations or evaluate how students might use technologies to solve
problems or communicate ideas.
• While teachers and schools are being asked to modify their practice based on
standardized test data, the tests are not designed to help teachers make
decisions about how to target their daily instruction.
• Current testing systems are rarely designed to measure a school or district’s
contribution to learning from a student’s first day until his or her last day.
How are summative and formative assessments different from one another
— and can they both support 21st century skills?
Assessments of 21st century skills, like assessments in general, fall under two broad
categories: summative and formative. All educators should be familiar with
summative tests, one common example being the National Assessment of
Educational Progress (NAEP) tests for reading, mathematics, science, writing, U.S.
history, civics, geography, and the arts. There also are summative classroom
assessments that, compared to the NAEP assessments, are administered more
narrowly and more frequently. Ideally, summative assessments of 21st century
skills should be given at the end of an instructional unit and provide accountability
as well as a measure of how schools, districts, and states are progressing in terms
of achieving 21st century skill competency in their students.
Effective summative
assessments of 21st
century skills should: ∗
Example
∗
All examples in this document are just that: individual illustrations of a particular idea or
concept. The Route 21 database contains many more examples.
The primary goal of formative 21st century tests is to make student learning and
understanding readily apparent, so that a teacher can adapt teaching strategies to
better meet students’ needs. Thus, successful formative assessments help
educators determine their students’ current knowledge, understandings,
misconceptions, and thinking processes. Below is a list of several key
characteristics of effective formative assessments of 21st century skills.
Effective formative
assessment of 21st
century skills
should: ∗
Example
Focus on 21st century 21st century subject matter includes, The Intel Education
skills and content (as in addition to the standard core Assessing Projects
defined by the P21 subjects, important areas of study tool is a database of
Framework) such as global awareness, civic assessments of hard-
literacy, etc., and skills, such as ICT to-measure 21st
literacy, critical thinking, problem- century skills like
solving, and life skills. critical thinking and
creativity.
∗
All examples in this document are just that: individual illustrations of a particular idea or
concept. The Route 21 database contains many more examples.
How can states create and implement assessments to promote 21st century
skills in their classrooms?
Where can I learn more about assessments that support 21st century
skills?
Amabile, T.M. (1983). The social psychology of creativity. New York: Springer-
Verlag Incorporated.
Andrade, A. (1999). The thinking classroom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Project Zero.
Retrieved May 5, 2007, from http://learnweb.harvard.edu/alps/thinking/index.cfm
Angelo, T.A., & Cross, K.P. (1993). Classroom assessment techniques: A handbook
for college teachers, 2nd ed. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Askew, M., Brown, M., Rhodes, V., Wiliam, D., & Johnson, D. (1997). Effective
teachers of numeracy. London: King's College, University of London.
Assessment Reform Group. (1999). Assessment for learning: Beyond the black box.
Cambridge: University of Cambridge School of Education.
Bangert-Drowns, R.L., Kulick, J.A., & Morgan, M.T. (1991). The instructional effect
of feedback in test-like events. Review of Educational Research, 61(2), 213-238.
Bernard-Powers, J., Darling-Hammond, L., Der Ramos, A., Kass, M., LaBoskey, V.,
& Markowitz, M., et al. (2000). Principles of high quality teacher development. San
Jose, CA: The Teacher Quality Collaborative.
Beyer, B. K. (1987). Practical strategies for the teaching of thinking. Boston: Allyn
& Bacon.
Black, P., & Wiliam, D. (1998). Assessment and classroom learning. Assessment in
Education, 5(1), 7-74.
Black, P. & Wiliam, D. (1998). Inside the black box? Raising standards through
classroom assessment. Phi Delta Kappan, 80(2), 139-148. Retrieved May 8, 2007,
from http://www.pdkintl.org/kappan/kbla9810.htm
Black, P., & Wiliam, D. (2001). Assessment and classroom learning. Assessment in
Education, March, 7-74.
Bowman, B.T., Donovan, M.S., & Burns, M.S. (Eds.). (2001). National Research
Council: Eager to learn: Educating our preschoolers. Washington, DC: National
Academy Press.
Costa, A. L., & Kallick, B. (2000). Building a system for assessing thinking. In A. L.
Costa (Ed.), Developing minds: A resource book for teaching thinking, (pp. 517-
534). Alexandria, VA: ASCD.
Duschl, R.D., & Gitomer, D.H. (1997). Strategies and challenges to change the
focus of assessment and instruction in science classrooms. Educational Assessment,
4(1), 37-73.
Frederiksen, J.R., & White, B.J. (1997). Reflective assessment of students' research
within an inquiry-based middle school science curriculum. Paper presented at the
annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Chicago, IL.
Herman, J.L., Ashbacher, P.R., & Winters, L. (1992). A practical guide to alternative
assessment. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum
Development.
Johnson, N., & Rose, L. (1997). Portfolios: Clarifying, constructing, and enhancing.
Lancaster, Pa.: Technomic Pub. Co.
Kennedy, M. (1991). Policy issues in teaching education. Phi Delta Kappan, 72(9),
661-666.
Leahy, S., Lyon, C., Thompson, M., & Wiliam, D. (2005). Classroom assessment—
minute by minute, day by day, Educational Leadership, 63(3), 18-24.
McCurdy, B.L., & Shapiro, E.S. (1992). A comparison of teacher monitoring, peer
monitoring, and self-monitoring with curriculum-based measurement in reading
among students with learning disabilities. Journal of Special Education, 26(2), 162-
180.
Paris, S., & Ayres, L. (1994). Becoming reflective students and teachers.
Washington D.C.: American Psychological Association.
Pausch, L.M., & Popp, M.P. (1997). Assessment of information literacy: Lessons
from the higher education assessment movement. Retrieved October 30, 2001,
from http://www.ala.org/acrl/paperhtm/d30.html
Pellegrino, J.W., Chudowsky, N., & Glaser, R. (2001). Knowing what students know:
The science and design of educational assessment. Washington, DC: National
Academy Press.
Quellmalz, E.S., & Haertel, G.D. (2006). Assessing new literacies in science and
mathematics. Menlo Park, CA: Center for Technology in Learning, SRI International.
Sadler, D.R. (1989). Formative assessment and the design of instructional systems.
Instructional Science, 18(2), 119-144.
Sawyer, R. J., Graham, S., & Harris, K.R. (1992). Direct teaching, strategy
instruction, and strategy instruction with explicit self-regulation: Effects on the
composition skills and self-efficacy of students with learning disabilities. Journal of
Educational Psychology, 84(3), 340-352.
Stiggins, R.J. (2002). Assessment crisis: The absence of assessment FOR learning.
Phi Delta Kappan. 83(10), 758-765.
Stiggins, R. (2004). New assessment beliefs for a new school mission. Phi Delta
Kappan, 86(1), 22-27.
Venezky, R. L., & Davis, C. (2002). Quo vademus? The transformation of schooling
in a networked world. Paris: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development. Retrieved May 10, 2007, from
http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/48/20/2073054.pdf
Vispoel, W.P., & Austin, J.R. (1995). Success and failure in junior high school: A
critical incident approach to understanding students' attributional beliefs. American
Educational Research Journal, 32(2), 377-412.
Wiggins, G. (1990). The case for authentic assessment. Washington, DC: American
Institute for Research.
Wilson, S. M., & Berne, J. (1999). Teacher learning and the acquisition of
professional knowledge: An examination of research on contemporary professional
development. In A. Iran-Nejad & P. D. Pearson (Eds.), Review of Research in
Education (pp. 173-209). Washington, DC: American Educational Research
Association.
Audio/Visual Resources
Edutopia Radio Show Archive: August 12, 2004, Authentic Assessment, Grant
Wiggins
Dr. Grant Wiggins, an expert in the hot topic of Assessment, will talk about
changing the way we measure student progress and authentic assessment.
http://www.edutopia.org/php/radio.php?id=R154