An insight into Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills (ATC21S)

Feb 6, 2010 11:52 GMT  ·  By

One of the aspects of Microsoft that should come as no surprise is that the company plans ahead not just next year’s product launches, but decades in advance, in terms of the evolution of its technology. Not limited to its own software, this strategy is an integral part of how the company is tackling problems faced by education systems worldwide. The Redmond giant is currently involved in an initiative designed to orchestrate and catalyze a deep transformation of teaching, learning and assessment of skills.

I covered the Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills in the past, but only recently got the chance to provide Softpedia readers with a deep insight into the initiative from Microsoft, Cisco and Intel. Anthony Salcito, VP Microsoft Worldwide Education was kind enough to answer a few questions on ATC21S, shedding light on the efforts done today to transform the way that your children will learn in the future.

1. Please tell us a bit about yourself and your role with Microsoft.

Anthony Salcito, Vice President, Worldwide Education - As vice president of education for Microsoft Corporation, I work with education institutions and partners globally to embrace technology and optimize learning environments and, ultimately, improve student achievement. In short, I work to help all students fully realize their potential.

2. What is the ATC21S project? Who’s behind the program besides Microsoft? And what are the end goals you hope to achieve?

The Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills (ATC21S) is a multi-stakeholder collaboration sponsored by Microsoft, Intel, and Cisco to help transform the teaching, learning and assessment of skills needed by students to succeed as citizens and workers into the future.

This project is focused on the initial tasks of defining these future skills and developing ways to measure them using technology. It will also address the pedagogical implications and provide evidence on how the skills can best be developed in education. The goals of the project include the following:

• Mobilize educational, political, and business communities around the world to help transform educational assessment and instructional practice as a global priority. • Specify in measurable terms the understanding and skills needed by productive and creative workers and citizens of the 21st century. • Identify methodological and technological barriers to ICT-based assessment. • Develop and pilot new assessment methodologies. • Examine and recommend innovative ICT-enabled, classroom-based learning environments and formative assessments that support the development of 21st century skills.

3. This question is directly related to the one above, but I feel I need to separate it in order to be better emphasized. Could you please explain what skills you consider vital for the 21st Century worker?

Opinions differ about what 21st century skills are, but most agree that they are the skills needed to help students today be successful with their jobs and careers in the future. This is especially critical given estimates that 60% of the jobs in the future do not exist today. They include skills such as collaboration, problem solving, creative thinking, digital literacy and more. One of our working groups was dedicated specifically to this task of categorizing and describing the skills we are trying to support and concluded that a useful way of thinking about these skills is:

• Ways of thinking o Creativity and innovation o Critical thinking, problem solving, decision making o Learning to learn, metacognition (knowledge about cognitive processes)

• Ways of working o Communication o Collaboration (teamwork)

• Tools for working o Information literacy o Information and communication technology (ITC) literacy

• Living in the world o Citizenship - local & global o Life and career o Personal and social responsibility -including cultural awareness and competence

4. What is the structure of the project? Please tell our readers more about the ATC21S Working Groups.

This past year, the ATC21S project operated through five working groups, each of which reviewed the state of development and proposed research and development activities to address current deficiencies. Together, the working groups comprise individuals from more than 60 research institutions, and focus on things like 21st century skills, methodological issues, technological issues, classroom learning environments and policy frameworks for new assessments. As we head into the next phase of the project, we will add more emphasis on actual assessment research.

5. Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills is obviously about the future of education. But I want to talk a little bit about the present. What are the problems Microsoft is facing when trying to find workers today that could be corrected through a reform of the education system?

As a global employer, Microsoft is deeply invested in a workforce that is equipped with the aforementioned 21st century skills. In fact, I would venture to say that hiring that kind of talent is critical to our long term success as a technology innovation and thought leader. In fact, one of the motivations for our sponsorship of this project is the gap that we currently see between the skills with which many students currently graduate and what we need in our current and future workforce.

You asked about finding workers. In the US, at least, the Bureau of Labor Statistics recently estimated that more than 300,000 technology-related jobs remain open due to a lack of qualified workers. We work very hard to find and have been fortunate to hire the top talent from around the world. However, we know that our recruiting would be easier if 21st century skills development were more ubiquitous in schools – better equipping future workers with the skills they need

6. Is ATC21S part of the solution?

Yes, ATC21S is part of the solution. In order to facilitate jobs and innovation, we recognize the importance of having a workforce imbued with different skills than schools are, by and large, teaching today – thus we believe that education needs to be transformed to deliver on this. A key way to transform education is by changing the assessment standards by which education is judged. With different assessment metrics in place, schools will be pushed to adapt their teaching and learning to deliver those skills of the future.

7. Speaking not only from the perspective of an employer, but also as a company running numerous initiatives to help education evolve, how long will it take to bring the education system in line with 21st Century requirements? While we don’t know the specific timeline for when education systems worldwide will be fully transformed to teach these future skills, I can share with you that we’re starting to get some outstanding traction. There are incredible programs we are already seeing deliver on this seemingly intractable challenge. For example, New Line Learning in Kent, England focuses on academic excellence – but has really made their mark with dramatic improvements in collaboration by eliminating traditional classroom structures and in citizenship by equipping their students with strategies for developing delayed gratification and courses in early childhood development. Change and adaptation will take time, however, in addition to specific school examples, , we are also encouraged by the commitment to these requirements by organizations like OECD and IEA for their 2012 and 2013 tests.

8. What has been done so far? Please share with us details of the progress made since the introduction of the project.

• All of the founding countries have signed up and are ready to participate in pilot projects

• We have enlisted more than 60 global education experts to lead the research phase of the effort

• We have completed key research to move the project from a theoretical phase to a practical phase including: o Defining a framework for 21st-century skills and selecting three categories to focus on immediately o Zeroing in on the key questions to which the project should seek answers o Identifying new types of information that can be gathered with computer-based student assessments o Determining that group performance needs to be assessed in addition to individual student performance o Extending the typical assessment period to include both primary and secondary schools so that developmental factors for 21st-century skills can be studied

• Five “founder countries” have agreed to take part in the research and will deploy ATC21S pilot projects in schools as early as February. The five are Australia, Finland, Portugal, Singapore and the United Kingdom.

9. Can you share additional details about the pilot countries of Australia, the United Kingdom, Finland, Singapore, and Portugal in relation to the ATC21S program?

The five “founder countries” have agreed to take part in the research and will deploy ATC21S pilot projects in schools as early as February. These countries have committed to provide experts to our advisory panel and working groups, participate in experimental studies of new assessments, use new assessment methods in national data collection, and, most importantly, add country perspective to the direction of the project.

10. Let’s say I’m a parent. What does ATC21S mean for my child now and in the future? The implications of this are that schools will move beyond the rote teaching of the industrial area and, instead, design curricula whose goals are to empower students with the 21st century skills such as collaboration, problem solving, digital literacy, citizenship, etc…. It means that your child will be equipped for the jobs that will exist in 10, 20, 50 and 100 years from now.

11. How long do you estimate that ATC21S will reach, let’s say, a village in a third-world country of your choice? And I’m talking about schools that have not a single computer yet.

The assessment methods will be freely available and will be applicable at the classroom, school, district and national levels. The working group led by Linda Darling-Hammond is currently working on just this challenge – how do you grow from a pilot to a more scaled rollout of this very different approach to assessment.

12. From what I’ve seen, ATC21S requires governments, schools and members of the private sector to work together. Microsoft certainly has the necessary power and influence to get the wheels in motion, but there’s a long way ahead. Please tell us more about future plans for 2010 and beyond, and how will Microsoft see ATC21S to fruition.

The key to this program is that it’s not just the corporate partners involved in this. The founding countries are critical to the success of this project –along with OECD and IEA. In 2010, the ATC21S project will set up new working groups to develop and pilot fresh approaches to assessing individual and collaborative problem solving and digital literacy in primary and secondary schools. This work will be done in collaboration with OECD and IEA, the leading global assessment agencies. Both intend to use the research findings in their next major rounds of assessments: OECD in Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2012 and IEA in 2013.

Microsoft, Intel and Cisco’s commitment doesn’t dictate what reforms are needed or how to accomplish them. The goal is to provide funding and resources so that experts in the field of education and educational assessment can conduct the research that will lead to new means of assessing and attaining 21st century skills.

Part of what makes the collaborative approach different is the focus on reforming assessment. The structure of current assessments worldwide mirrors, and also profoundly shapes, what is taught in schools and how it is taught. The imbalance between the skills students learn through school and what they’ll need in the workplace must be resolved if education systems are to address the economic and social needs of the future.

13. What are the biggest methodological and technological issues that ATC21S needs to break down?

Methodologically speaking, the group has been considering how to develop assessments of 21st century skills that can be administered at the national level in the founder countries. Although learning progressions are fairly well understood in reading, mathematics, science and some other standard curriculum areas, as tests can reveal individual student’s progress over time as well as current differences in levels of achievement between schools, systems and even countries. But with 21st century skills, however, developmental progressions are less clear. How do students become better collaborators – or do they – as they age? How should we measure a student’s creativity, innovation, critical thinking, or ability to solve problems or make decisions? Is problem solving a generalized skill, or is it different depending upon whether you are trying to solve, say, a math problem or a political problem?

The Working Group on Technological Issues is focused on the use of technology for the collection, processing and analysis of information from educational assessments. Technology can be used to improve assessments. For example, it allows you to discover a student’s path to an answer and can then help teachers understand how students got to a right or wrong response and adjust their teaching accordingly. Making students’ thinking visible via technology is an area the group wants to tackle.

14. How can other people and organizations interested in the program participate? Other countries wanting to participate will be able to view the edited papers on the www.atc21s.org Web site, and can add to them as well as comment on them. This means that countries and organizations that had not had the opportunity to engage with the initial work can still contribute to the knowledge base. Additionally, we will create a place on the ATC21S Web site where countries can register current projects they are working on that align to research areas where we feel more study is needed. This way, we will be able to create a global map of work being done and allow people to find out who is working on similar areas or find people working on areas of interest.