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21st Century Collaborative: 21st Century Assessment

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21st Century Assessment

John Norton (TLN), Cathy Gassenheimer (ABPC) and I were discussing 21st Century assessment the other day. I shared with them the assessments that Ken Kay highlighted during his presentation at Edustat. I'll copy the post below. John Norton says we should be asking ourselves..."What skills and qualities of mind do we want our graduates to have?" Related question: "How do we assess whether students are acquiring these skills and qualities of mind?"

Reading the recent essay on 21st Century assessment published as an  EdWeek op-ed a few weeks ago... which essentially makes the case that we are assessing kids for the wrong skills. The essay is written by a team of folks involved with the Partnership for 21st Century Skills.

The new assessments will have to do the following:

** Be largely performance-based. We need to know how students apply
content knowledge to critical-thinking, problem-solving, and
analytical tasks throughout their education, so that we can help them

Highlighted by labgib

Ken told us that the amount of information is doubling every 24 months and that by 2020 the amount of information will double in every 72 days. What this means is content memorization will simply not work anymore. It is currently impossible; especially at the rate knowledge is changing, to master it all. And even if you did, the content that you learn in your freshman year of college would be outdated by the time you graduate. Literacy in the 21st Century is not based on do you know it- rather, can you find it, analyze it, adapt it, and synthesize it? John Tao says as we move out of the information age into this new era of creativity an individual’s value will not be based on what he knows, but what he can create.

What Do We Need to Teach?
We also need to teach students adaptive expertise. They need to not only be self-directed but have the ability to embrace ambiguity. In their future, our students will be working with teams in virtual spaces that they have never met, on goals that are abstract. They need to understand how to adapt and create. In fact, it is a tough call even trying to predict what they will need as for the first time in educational history we are preparing students for jobs that haven’t even been invented yet. What skills do kids need now? They need the ability to redefine themselves and the way they do their work. They need critical thinking skills, self defense tools that will help them redefine the value of the enterprise in which they find themselves.

Highlighted by labgib