critical thinking in 21st century

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Instructing & Assessing 21st Century Skills: A Focus on Critical Thinking

Research and Best Practices: One in a Series on 21st Century Skills

For the full collection of related blog posts and literature reviews, see the Center for Assessment’s toolkit, Assessing 21 st Century Skills .

Educational philosophers from Plato and Socrates to John Dewey highlighted the importance of critical thinking and the intrinsic value of instruction that reaches beyond simple factual recall. However there is considerable dispute about how to define critical thinking, let alone instruct and assess students’ critical thinking over time. This post briefly defines critical thinking, explains what we know from the research about how critical thinking develops and is best instructed, and provides an overview of some major assessment issues. Our full literature review on critical thinking can be accessed  here .

Overall, findings from the literature suggest that critical thinking involves both cognitive skills  and  dispositions. These two aspects are captured in a consensus definition reached by a panel of leading critical thinking scholars and researchers and reported in the Delphi Report:

“purposeful, self-regulatory  judgment which results in interpretation, analysis, evaluation, and inference, as well as explanation  of the evidential, conceptual, methodological, criteriological, or contextual considerations upon which that judgment is based”  ( Facione, 1990 , p. 3).

Debate continues about the extent to which critical thinking is generic or discipline-specific. If critical thinking is generic, then it arguably could be taught in separate courses, with the sole focus being on the development of critical thinking skills. However, if critical thinking is particular to a discipline, the instruction to develop it must be embedded within disciplinary content. Though debate exists, we argue that what constitutes critical thinking in science likely differs somewhat from what constitutes critical thinking in history or art. Therefore, critical thinking is best understood as discipline-specific with some transferable, generic commonalities.

Critical thinking is also intertwined with other cognitive, interpersonal, and intrapersonal competencies. For example, many researchers have connected creativity and critical thinking. Furthermore, one’s ability to demonstrate critical thinking relies on effective communication, metacognition, self-direction, motivation, and other related competencies.

Development

Adults do not always employ critical thinking when it’s called for. Many find personal experience more compelling than logical thought or empirical evidence. That said, research suggests that even young children can demonstrate aspects of critical thinking.

However, little is known about how critical thinking skills and dispositions develop; there are no empirically-validated learning progressions of critical thinking skills and dispositions. Indeed, the Delphi Report cautioned that its framework for critical thinking should not be interpreted as implying a developmental progression or hierarchical taxonomy.

Instruction

Empirical research shows that critical thinking can be taught and that some specific instructional approaches and strategies promote more critical thinking. These instructional approaches include explicit teaching of disciplinary content within a course that also teaches critical thinking skills.

Instructional strategies that promote critical thinking include providing…

• Opportunities for students to solve problems with multiple solutions,
• Structure that allows students to respond to open-ended questions and formulate solutions to problems, and
• A variety of learning activities that allow students to choose and engage in solving authentic problems.

Implications of Research for Classroom Assessment Design

Critical thinking is typically assessed within content areas. For example, students analyze evidence, construct arguments, and evaluate the veracity of information and arguments in relation to disciplinary core ideas and content. Assessing students’ level of sophistication with critical thinking skills and dispositions requires close attention to the nature of the task used to elicit students’ critical thinking. Assessments must be thoughtfully designed and structured to (a) prompt complex judgments; (b) include open-ended tasks that allow for multiple, defensible solutions; and (c) make student reasoning visible to teachers. Each is discussed in detail below.

• Assessment tasks should prompt complex judgments.  While some students may exhibit critical thinking without being prompted, most student responses will rise or sink to what the task requires. Therefore, the materials (visual, texts, etc.) used to elicit students’ critical thinking are crucial and have a sizable impact on the extent to which critical thinking is elicited in any given assessment experience. If the task doesn’t ask students to think critically, they likely will not demonstrate evidence of critical thinking. The task, embedded in projects or other curriculum activities, must be designed and structured thoughtfully to elicit students’ critical thinking.
• Assessment tasks should include open-ended tasks.  Open-ended tasks are the opposite of traditional standardized assessments, which rely heavily on selected-response item types that assess limited aspects of critical thinking and other 21 st  century skills ( Ku, 2009 ;  Lai & Viering, 2012 ). Open-ended tasks allow students to decide what information is relevant, how to use the information, and how to demonstrate their understanding of the information; open-ended tasks also allow multiple solution pathways. In contrast, closed tasks typically have one correct solution, and the teacher indicates what information is relevant and how the information is to be presented.
• Assessment tasks should make student thinking visible to teachers.  To provide formative feedback regarding the quality of students’ critical thinking, teachers must administer assessment tasks that render student thinking visible. This can be accomplished in multiple ways, but their commonality is that all approaches likely will require students to provide written or verbal evidence that support their claims, judgments, assertions, and so on.

For a more complete discussion of the topics covered in this post, the full literature review on critical thinking is available  here .

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The ABCs of Critical Thinking: What It Is and Why It Matters

January 10, 2024 por Valentina Gimenez Leave a Comment

Thinking is a natural act for human beings. Every day, we have thousands of thoughts. However, just because we are thinking does not mean we are doing it well or that all our thoughts require critical reasoning because doing so would be too exhausting. Critical thinking becomes a core skill in a world that is changing so dynamically. Thinking critically not only helps with generating a well-founded personal opinion but also helps solve complex problems in many ways.

Given the importance of this skill, the good news is that critical thinking can be exercised and trained. In other words, this 21st-century skill can be intentionally taught. Below, we will explain how.

What Is Critical Thinking?

According to the publication of the brief series Life Skills. Fostering Critical Thinking by the 21st Century Skills Initiative, “critical thinking mainly aims at assessing the strength and appropriateness of a statement, theory, or idea through a questioning  and  perspective-taking  process, which  may  or  may  not  in  turn  result in a possibly novel statement or  theory.”

Furthermore, in this publication by Stéphan Vincent-Lancrin , it is argued that “critical thinking need not lead to an original position to a problem. The most conventional one may be the most appropriate. However, it typically involves examining and evaluating different possible positions”.

In other words, it is not limited to solving problems after a reflection. It is also about being able and willing to challenge the core assumptions of accepted theories, paradigms, or knowledge.

Critical thinking implies recognizing that other perspectives may also have merit and, therefore, evaluating each argument or theory’s possible strengths, weaknesses, and biases is possible, no matter how unaligned they are with what we think.

Critical thinking involves using logic, reasoning, and creativity to reach conclusions.

Why Is Critical Thinking Important?

Critical thinking is a skill that has applications in practically all aspects of daily life. It can help you make better decisions, improve employability, and better understand the world. In other words, critical thinking is a fundamental skill for being a 21st-century citizen.

What Is Critical Thinking Used For?

Critical thinking has various functionalities in everyday life, whether in fulfilling professional obligations or carrying out personal activities. Thinking critically is used to:

• Make good decisions : it is important as an exercise to analyze and evaluate sources of information based on their truthfulness, relevance, and reasoning, which leads to better decision-making. Ask or question before blindly accepting things as they appear, and form your judgment based on the facts, information, and knowledge available.
• Solve problems: use logic and reasoning to analyze and deconstruct problems and choose the best solutions considering the weaknesses and strengths of each alternative solution.
• Promote creativity : this is one of the main characteristics of critical thinking and is associated with the previous point, by questioning facts, theories, or concepts, space is also opened up which is very useful for developing new solutions to problems.
• Improve employability: especially in the digital age, where many jobs are being automated, there is consensus that critical thinking and creativity are two fundamental skills for improving people’s employment prospects.
• Digital and global citizenship : Critical thinking plays a role in individual well-being, but above all, it is considered an essential pillar of the functioning of modern democracies. The ability to voice an independent and well-founded opinion to vote and weigh the quality of arguments presented in the media and other sources of information. In addition, when misinformation, fallacies, and fake news can be a problem for democratic systems, critical thinking helps prevent the spread of false information. It contributes verified, respectful, and ethical content to digital communities and social networks.

4 Steps to Exercise Critical Thinking

According to the publication on critical thinking, there are four key cognitive processes involved in exercising critical thinking:

Determining and understanding the problem is an important first dimension of a critical thinking inquisitive process. This sometimes includes asking why the problem is posed in a certain way, examining whether associated solutions or claims can be based on inaccurate facts or reasoning, and identifying knowledge gaps. This inquiry process partly concerns rational thinking (checking facts, observing, and analyzing reasoning). Still, it includes a more ‘critical’ dimension when identifying possible limitations of the solution and questioning some of the underlying assumptions and interpretations, even when the facts are accurate.

In critical thinking, imagination plays an important role in the mental elaboration of an idea, but all thinking involves some level of imagination. At a higher level, imagination also consists of identifying and reviewing alternative or competing worldviews and theories with an open mind to consider the problem from multiple perspectives.

This allows for a better identification of the strengths and weaknesses of the proposed evidence, arguments, and assumptions, although this evaluation also belongs to the inquisitive process.

The product of critical thinking is one’s position or solution to a problem or judgment about others’ positions or solutions. This mainly involves good inference, a balance between different ways of looking at the problem, and, therefore, recognition of its possible complexities.

As with good thinking, critical thinking involves the ability to argue and justify one’s position rationally, with relevant information, under existing perspectives and socially recognized forms of reasoning, or possibly some new ones.

4. Reflect or evaluate

Finally, although one may consider their stance or way of thinking to be superior to some alternatives, perhaps because it encompasses a broader view or is better supported by existing evidence, critical thinking involves some process of self-reflection on the perspective one espouses, It is possible limitations, and uncertainties. Therefore, this type of thinking implies a certain level of humility, as thinking critically also involves openness to competing ideas.

While one should not adopt ancient skepticism and suspend judgment in all cases, sometimes this may be the most appropriate position.

You may also be interested: 4 Benefits of Developing Listening Skills and the Steps to Achieve It

How to Be a Critical Thinker?

Being a critical thinker brings enormous benefits that go beyond the workplace. It is also good for personal development and daily life in the community. So how do you achieve it?

To be a critical thinker you have to exercise other habits and skills, such as fostering curiosity, questioning the established, improving analysis and communication skills, maintaining self-discipline and being alert to cognitive biases.

Let’s review some of the key skills acquired by great critical thinkers:

• Identify relationships between variables and hypothesis testing.
• Master systemic thinking and scientific reasoning.
• Understand the underlying social, natural, and technological relationships in a system.
• Exercise informational literacy, which includes understanding, finding, and obtaining data, reading, interpreting, evaluating, and handling data.
• Avoid cognitive biases; consider all available information, not just what aligns with your point of view.
• Create a strategy, theory, method, or argument based on evidence synthesis.
• Create an argument that goes beyond the available information.
• Computational thinking: for example, abstractions and generalizations of patterns, structured problem decomposition, and iterative thinking.
• Be able to criticize a work product regarding its credibility, relevance, and bias using a set of standards or a specific framework.

These activities to promote critical thinking can be driven at home, at school, or individually.

Teaching Critical Thinking

Although education systems do not usually have a subject specifically dedicated to developing critical thinking, this skill can be developed as part of other learning. Therefore, the publication “Life Skills: Fostering Critical Thinking” develops some strategies for teaching this skill in schools.

Including Critical Thinking in Education

• Use conceptual rubrics that clarify the skills involved.
• Include critical thinking as a learning objective in lesson plans.
• Provide students with tasks and problems that encourage them to question their cognitive abilities and assumptions and explore multiple perspectives.
• Generate an environment in which students feel safe to take risks expressing their thoughts and expressions that arise from their reasoning.
• Assess critical thinking by including it in exams and national assessments.

By fostering these strategies at all educational levels, students can be better prepared for the future with critical thinking skills and improve the quality of their education.

And you, do you consider yourself a critical thinker? How has exercising critical thinking helped you in your life? Check out our blog and discover more content to boost your critical thinking!

Valentina Gimenez

Valentina Giménez es coordinadora de comunicación de la División de Educación en el Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo. Es uruguaya. Fue periodista y productora de contenidos, especializada en temas políticos. Ha trabajado para televisión y prensa escrita. Tiene un MBA por la UCU Business School y es Licenciada en Comunicación Social por la Universidad Católica del Uruguay. Fue consultora en asuntos públicos y comunicación estratégica en su país.

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{{item.title}}, my essentials, ask for help, contact edconnect, directory a to z, how to guides, education for a changing world, key skills for the 21st century, about the report.

Stephen Lamb, Esther Doecke and Quentin Maire from Victoria University's Centre for International Research on Education Systems (CIRES) investigate the evidence for 21st-century skills and how they might be best taught and assessed.

The report investigates the evidence base for nine commonly identified 21st-century skills:

• Critical thinking
• Creative thinking
• Metacognition
• Problem-solving
• Collaboration
• Self-efficacy
• Conscientiousness
• Perseverance

Published: August 2017.

Download the report

Future Frontiers Analytical Report: Key Skills for the 21st Century [PDF 2MB]

Executive Summary [PDF 288KB]

Listen to the podcast

[School bell ringing, sounds of children playing in a playground; introductory sound bites]

Jennifer Macey:

From the New South Wales Department of Education – this is Charlie’s Future.

Stephen Lamb:

The concept for example of an inquiring mind, a lifelong learner, an ethical citizen, the concept of somebody who's entrepreneurial. You want people, in no matter what sphere of life, to become actively engaged as a citizen. These sorts of skills are important, and increasingly important in a world where the world of work itself is changing.

Welcome to Charlie’s Future, a podcast series that explores the role of education in preparing young people to thrive in an age of Artificial Intelligence. This podcast is part of the ‘Education for a Changing World initiative’ by the New South Wales Department of Education.

Join us as we meet some of the leading thinkers on this issue. We’ll explore the future of work, the future of education, and the future skills needed to navigate this brave new world.

At Sydney Olympic Park, high school students are competing in the annual regional first robotics challenge.

Female student:

So the robots start inside the field and then the robots have to try and get gears, and the robots drive over and catch the gears, which they put onto the steam ship.

Each school team have physically built and coded their own robot on wheels. They use remote controls to manoeuvre these machines across a field, make their robots climb a rope, and manipulate their robot to collect and drop plastic gears or discs into baskets.

The human player which is the pilot inside the tower will pick up the gear. Once they have a certain amount of gears, they can turn the gears and activate a rotor. There are four rotors and you get points for each rotor you get.

This high-stakes competition doesn’t just involve the ICT skills of coding, or engineering – these students are using all their 21st century skills, including collaboration, communication, computational thinking...

Male student:

One of the main things we have to talk about is where do we want to start and also discuss our end-game strategy:

... creativity, problem solving and even resilience when faced with a disappointing call from an umpire.

Critical thinking, problem solving, creativity, resilience – these are some of the 21st century skills that schools are now being encouraged to teach alongside traditional skills of numeracy and literacy. But what exactly are 21st century skills? How do you teach them? How do you assess them?

Remember Charlie and their friends? They’re starting school, which means they’ll be finishing school in about 2030 or 2040. So what skills that will best equip Charlie to navigate an AI future?

The New South Wales Department of Education commissioned some of the country’s leading thinkers on the future of education to consider these questions. The researchers at the Centre for International Research on Education Systems at Victoria University examine school systems around the world to find out where these 21st century skills are being taught and who’s doing it best.

Professor Stephen Lamb, Dr Quentin Maire and Esther Doeke collected evidence from around the world and produced a report titled ‘Key Skills for the 21st Century: an evidence-based review’ which is available on the Department’s website.

[While we were recording this interview – the Victorian police were testing their emergency alarms throughout the city.]

So to begin, what exactly are 21st century skills?

Quentin Maire:

Generally, we think about them as what students will need in the future to succeed in life, in work but also in life more broadly. As part of this report we identified nine skills that most states or countries focus on. They can be grouped in different ways but one way of looking at them would be to focus on the more cognitive heavy skills, so those where thinking is really at the centre, and these ones are critical thinking, creativity, metacognition, and problem solving. But also some more dispositional or attitudinal skills that matter as well and these can be skills like collaboration, working with others, motivation, self-efficacy (so: can I can I do it? can I succeed?), conscientiousness and grit or perseverance. So, these other nine skills that we've looked at.

And they're sometimes called soft skills aren't they?

Yes because they're not necessarily considered in the same way as literacy and numeracy and the things that we take as hard skills associated with the sort of traditional subject areas. So they’re more competencies or capacities that somebody has that they can apply across all areas of their life so to speak, in thinking about work and thinking about the way they live, the ways of thinking and so on.

It's important to note, right up front that this isn’t an exhaustive list and it’s not unassailable because a lot of this interest came around through thinking through the impact of digital literacy and sort of management of information and how it's important today to become very competent and being able to use computers for example and iPads and Facebook and all the sorts of things that are associated with it and apply across so many different domains and areas.

There are also these other sorts of skills that are associated with critical thinking and problem solving. So it’s more about the ways of thinking and the tools that we think with rather than just the knowledge that sits at the base of a lot of subject areas.

What about digital literacy? There seems to be a recent push in many schools to teach coding - but Esther Doeke says 21st century skills are more than just coding, and being able to critically analyse big data is one skill that will become increasingly important.

Esther Doeke:

I’ll start with digital literacy. That’s a really important skill, not only from the mechanics from being able to code or being able to set up the ICT infrastructure required, but also the ability to critically assess the information they get online. That’s obviously a big buzzword at the moment with fake news; but it’s true, it’s a real skill and students should be given opportunities to develop those skills within schools.

Critical thinking involves a judgment or an evaluation of claims of evidence of arguments to decide what is right or what should be done. So it's really that evaluation dimension of what is there and how solid is it that matters.

Then we have other and other skills that are important. Metacognition is really about is thinking about one's thinking, in a sense, so meta-thinking, if you wish, and really that's about monitoring how your thinking works in the achievement of a given goal. So if I want to solve something, I want to complete something, how's is my thinking helping or on track to get this done? So students can think about what they did right or wrong and still be, in a way, engaging with their own thinking.

I think it may also be worth mentioning that these skills do not replace some other skills like literacy and numeracy - these are not being discarded, they're coming in as a broader set of skills that students are expected to develop.

So why are these key 21st century skills so important?

There are various reasons why I think why countries or states are focusing on these skills. One of the reasons is because they are associated with positive outcomes in schools or in education. So, students who do well at examinations or in Year 12 for example, generally tend to do well in these areas as well: so they tend to be pretty good at considering that it can succeed, they are conscientious, they can focus on the tasks etc. So that's a first reason.

But there is another reason which is related to the changes that are happening in the workforce and the types of work or labour that these students will do in the future.

Yes - there is an economist called James Heckman who did all this work on, looking from very early on, what predicts future success. And he identified that these sorts of skills including some things that almost sound like traits which are, you know, your perseverance, your conscientiousness, your application, your motivation, these sorts of things and the levels of them, were associated with future success well beyond the impact of qualifications.

So how do you teach 21st century skills, such as critical thinking or meta-cognition in a classroom. Can they be taught as a subject like maths and English?

That’s a really good question because of a lot of systems and other countries spend a lot of time in defining these concepts - and there is no one real definition, there’s multiple definitions. So when it comes down to collecting evidence about teaching it, we actually can’t find a lot out there. We can point to some really positive practice that we can see, for instance, it comes to mind, applied learning, project based learning is a really great way to incorporate a range of these skills within various disciplines, and giving kids the chance to develop these skills in a meaningful way.

So for instance in VET or Vocational Education and Training, it’s about applied learning, students are say in a hospitality kitchen and within that there’s a unit on communication. So, students are learning how to communicate, how to work with the chef, and that’s very valuable, because it’s not communication being learnt in an esoteric way, they’re applying it.

Well one of the difficulties or one of the issues is that we have a long history of taking up our subject areas like mathematics and English and we've worked out over a period of time the sorts of texts and the way that this knowledge should be taught. With these sorts of skills these newly discussed sorts of skills that we're talking about, there isn't the long history we have about knowing how best to teach them. So in many of the schools and systems that have attempted to emphasise this in recent times, they have come to, even within their subject areas, focus on the sorts of tasks that may involve project based learning that Esther has just talked about as a means of promoting things like collaboration, communication skills, problem solving within the context of a project. Because this brings students and learners together and it allows them to operate together and emphasise the sorts of skills and outlooks that they need and that we're talking about in relation to these sorts of skills.

And what about things like grit or perseverance – aren’t these innate characteristics that can be developed in children before they even start school?

How do we teach young people to be resilient for example - there isn't necessarily easy tasks that we can go to or activities within a classroom that they can teach that in that sort of way. So this is where this new knowledge being having to be formed about the best sorts of ways in which resilience and grit and perseverance can happen, because we can see within subject areas like mathematics, as tasks become harder, to teach teacher can't afford really, doesn't want the children to give up. They've got to be able to display a capacity to keep on task and keep doing what's required. And that's true of every subject area - just because things become harder, we can't necessarily allow students to give up on their learning. So, it's how we teach that grit and perseverance so that they keep going even under some difficult circumstances. It's a very valuable skill and applies to so many different areas.

So we've been engaged with half a dozen schools that have taken on some sets of tasks in which we can look at how well students have acquired certain skills around critical thinking in particular. There was a task that actually involved trying to answer the question, think about the evidence that's available in and around whether we have landed on the moon. So there’s a set of tasks built up around that can which teachers take on and there's quite a range of evidence that’s there which people can pursue to look at about whether we have or haven't. There's evidence both ways and so it's getting somebody or some students to think through what that evidence looks like, where they would go to get it, and how that looks, and then to be able to make judgements and rational judgments themselves based on that evidence. What do they think coming to that point of view. There isn't necessarily a right or wrong answer here, but it's the process they go through, their reasoning that's what's important.

So the natural follow-up question would be: how should a school assess something like resilience or critical thinking skills?

Some of the skills can be assessed more directly through direct assessment like we'd have a NAPLAN test, but many of these skills that we're describing can't be got at in that sort of way. For example, the concept of resilience: it's not clear how you would get that through a direct assessment.

That could come about through teacher judgment and teachers standing back and judging how resilient a student is or their critical thinking or problem solving or other sorts of skills, or we can use self-reported tests, which is a longstanding way of doing this, which is to actually ask students a set of items give them a set of items to which they respond. And from that being able to assess their level of based on what they report their level of skill.

The research report found that in the US, the core districts of California have embraced the teaching of these 21st century skills and have already set up tools to test for and measure their students proficiency in these skills.

Look, the core districts are a good example. They cover about 1.2 million students across a series of districts in California that have grouped together. They have implemented it at a whole-of-district level, across all of their districts, and they apply it both in the learning and what students are expected to acquire whilst they’re at school, but they’ve also gone on to think about assessment and judgement.

I think the core districts really stood out for us because they’re not only interested in these concepts and putting them into the curriculum and defining them, they’re also measuring them within their students and using them as a way for school improvement. And they’re measuring these concepts, through a student self-reported measure: so, asking the students a series of questions that can then determine a rating of how well the students are going on concepts such as growth mindset, and self-efficacy and self-management.

The truth is that they’re one of the first school districts or school systems to do this type of stuff, to measure it in such a comprehensive way. Our systems here in Australia do run, say for instance in NSW, there’s the ‘Tell Them From Me’ survey, which is asking students every year in NSW, respond to a series of questions, defining how much they feel belonging, or how much they feel safe at school. But this is actually stepping back and measuring these key skills for 21st century in a different way and providing schools with the means from which to learn from each other and improve.

And they've done some work which compares whether teacher judgments, self-reporting and direct assessment, and found that the student assessment self-reporting is quite robust. And they've taken it as far now as including it within their school performance framework, so they actually judge schools by the levels of skills that students display and have acquired in school.

So this is going much further than most of the systems where we're still trying to identify what it is going to focus on and how we're going to do it. Here's a system that's actually taken that to a point of thinking about how well their schools are doing in delivering on these things.

The teaching and testing of 21st century skills are at different stages of development in school systems around the world. The researchers point out that one of the aspects holding some systems back is a lack of support for teachers to implement the concepts and assessments.

It’s really important that teachers are supported. We have to firstly value their teacher judgement of these concepts, know that they are already assessing students on many of these dimensions that we have identified as key skills. We should value what they’re already doing in schools. And something that we felt that came out to us when we were reading through all the materials is that, we’re seeing lots of development on the policy front in terms of schools, but we’re not seeing then teacher training programs taking it onboard, saying we’re going to start working this through our programs. If teachers aren’t prepared to work in this 'new frontier', so to speak, we can’t expect them to start delivering on it, it’s not fair.

I think you're right, I think the point that Esther made about teachers and their preparation, their readiness for teaching these skills is very important. And in fact, we have evidence from New Zealand actually showing that teachers and schools find it, or have found it difficult, to teach these skills and to make sure students learn these skills. But at the same time, we also have evidence from New Zealand, as well, of grass-root developments in schools of teachers and schools coming together to develop tools and instruments, pedagogical tools to help students learn these [skills]. So, I think we’re in the early stages of evidence based that we need to understand how we can teach and develop these skills.

Teacher training is very important, and so is professional development: I mean they’re the two main mechanisms. So at the present moment I don't think that these skills have necessarily filtered their way through to teacher training and have been taken up with the sort of systematic rigour that's required; but this is needed in the future.

Well I think that, the way it’s framed in the Australian Curriculum at the moment, which is that these [skills] should be across all disciplines, and ideally would like all teachers to come together and plan in a team-based approach which skill is coming into which subject and when – I think ideally, that would be great. But knowing how schools work, obviously not all teachers can make the time to do that. So, for instance, we see in the social and ethical understanding subjects in Victoria, we find a lot of PE (Physical Education) teachers being put into that type of planning because people think that’s the ideal fit. But really it would be great for all subjects to get onboard and see where it can fit in some way.

There has been an evaluation in New Zealand about these 21st century skills or key skills, and they looked at secondary schools and between 2012 and 2015. They found that little progress had occurred in student’s exposure to the skills or opportunities for developing these skills. And then they actually asked teachers and principals why that was the case, and they mentioned exactly what you said: that the schedule is too tight, there is too much, we have to focus on senior secondary examinations, there is a lot, and therefore this doesn't come high enough in our priority list, in a sense.

And there seems to be some agreement in this report with the previous report on ‘The Best and Worst of Times’ by the academics at Sydney University - that schools should not just be a preparing students for industry and university, but also to be critical and engaged citizens who can thrive in an increasingly complex future.

I think if we were to ask a group of employers, for example, they would point to these things as being critical. So yes, they want people with content knowledge, but they want people with more than just content knowledge, who can be adaptable and flexible, and think about things in new sorts of ways, so that they are creative and innovative in the way that they operate.

If we undertake this correctly. yeah, it could be very revolutionary. If we think it through deeply, and enact change over various fronts, and not just put this emphasis in the prep into year ten area of schooling - we mention in our report we don’t want our schools to be just ATAR factories or university preparatory systems - we want them also to factor this in for when students are in the crucial final stages of schooling. So, don’t create this just for the early years. And if we can transfer these learnings into the upper secondary years, perhaps that could be quite revolutionary, I think.

The concept for example of an inquiring mind, a lifelong learner, an ethical citizen, the concept of somebody who's entrepreneurial - these are goals that we're thinking about, and these tie over to professions and jobs that people have. You want people no matter what sphere of life to have those sorts of qualities. But they do cover all spheres of life, engaging for example in local politics, your local community, becoming actively engaged as a citizen. These sorts of skills are increasingly important in a world where the world of work itself is changing and we can't guarantee now the sorts of jobs that have been there in the past will be there in the future. But what we can ensure is that people who have and are equipped and skilled in certain ways, with these sorts of skills, will be more flexible will be more adaptable. The concept of an inquiry mind for example to learn for themselves and to be able to be more self-sufficient as learners and agents.

What final words of wisdom would our researchers have for little Charlie, who is starting school this year?

I would say remaining open minded to various approaches to learning, and learning about different things, and including these skills that can then broaden the perspective and the views or outlooks on life.

Well you could just focus in on the sorts of skills that Charlie may need in the future. An important message here is that systems have to be able to help Charlie along the way, and that's what this is really all about: trying to identify what schools can do, and school administrations, to be able to ensure that everything's in place so that Charlie can make the best out of their schooling and walk away with the sort of platform of skills that Charlie needs to be able to operate successfully in a future world.

I guess I would say to Charlie that the skills that we’re talking about also might change in 5 or 10 years, so hopefully, they will be able to be dynamic in the way they conceptualise skills in that we’re not being definitive, giving them that freedom for the future.

That was Professor Stephen Lamb, Dr Quentin Maire and Esther Doeke from the Centre for International Research on Education Systems at Victoria University in Melbourne, ending this episode of Charlie’s Future – a podcast series by the New South Wales Education Department.

Go online to read the full report - 'Key Skills for the 21st Century: an evidence-based review'. Just do a search for ‘Future Frontiers’ on the Department’s website. There you’ll also find links to all the reports commissioned for the Education for a Changing World initiative.

And do join this conversation. If you have comments get in touch with us through our Facebook group: Future Frontiers: Education for a Changing World. Our Twitter handle is: @education2040, Hashtag #futurefrontiers, or email us at [email protected].

Thanks so much for joining us. This is Charlie’s Future.

Additional resources

Watch the Charlie's Future animation that explores what the world will look like for children starting school today, and what skills they will need to flourish.

• Teaching and learning

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Critical Thinking: Facilitating and Assessing the 21st Century Skills in Education

So many times we hear our students say, “Why am I learning this?”

I believe that Critical Thinking is the spark that begins the process of authentic learning. Before going further, we must first develop an idea of what learning is… and what learning is not.  So many times we hear our students say, “Why am I learning this?” The reason they ask is because they have not really experienced the full spectrum of learning, and because of this are actually not learning to a full rewarding  extent! We might say they are being exposed to surface learning and not authentic (real) learning. The act of authentic learning is actually an exciting and engaging concept. It allows students to see real meaning and begin to construct their own knowledge.  Critical Thinking is core to learning. It is rewarding, engaging, and life long. Without critical thinking students are left to a universe of concepts and memorization.  Yes… over twelve years of mediocrity! When educators employ critical thinking in their classrooms, a whole new world of understanding is opened up.   What are some reasons to facilitate critical thinking with our students? Let me begin:

Ten Reasons For Student Critical Thinking in the classroom

• Allows for necessary inquiry that makes learning exciting
• Provides a method to go beyond memorization to promote understanding.
• Allows students to visualize thoughts, concepts, theories, models & possibilities.
• Promotes curriculum standards, trans-disciplinary ideas & real world connections.
• Encourages a classroom culture of collaboration that promotes deeper thinking.
• Builds skills of problem solving, making implications, & determining consequences.
• Facilitates goal setting, promotion of process, and perseverance to achieve.
• Teaches self reflection and critique, and the ability to listen to others’ thoughts.
• Encourages point of view  while developing persuasive skills.
• Guides interpretation while developing a skill to infer and draw conclusions.

I am excited by the spark that critical thinking ignites to support real and authentic learning in the classroom. I often wonder how much time students spend in the process of critical thinking in the classroom. I ask you to reflect on your typical school day. Are your students spending time in area of surface learning , or are they plunging into the engaging culture of deeper (real) learning?  At the same time … how are you assessing your students? So many times as educators, we are bound by the standards, and we forget the importance of promoting that critical thinking process that makes our standards come alive with understanding. A culture of critical thinking is not automatic, though with intentional planning  it can become a reality. Like the other 21st century skills, it must be built and continuously facilitated. Let’s take a look at how, we as educators, can do this.

Ten Ways to Facilitate Student Critical Thinking in the Classroom and School

• Design Critical Thinking Activities.  (This might include mind mapping, making thinking visible, Socratic discussions, meta-cognitive mind stretches, Build an inquiry wall with students and talk about the process of thinking”
• Provide time for students to collaborate.  (Collaboration can be the button that starts critical thinking. It provides group thinking that builds on the standards. Have students work together while solving multi-step and higher order thinking problems. Sometimes this might mean slow down to increase the learning.)
• Provide students with a Critical Thinking rubric.  (Have them look at the rubric before a critical thinking activity, and once again when they are finished)
• Make assessment of Critical Thinking an ongoing effort.  (While the teacher can assess, have students assess themselves. Self assessment can be powerful)
• Concentrate on specific indicators in a rubric.  (There are various indicators such as; provides inquiry, answers questions, builds an argument etc. Concentrate on just one indicator while doing a lesson. There can even be an exit ticket reflection)
• Integrate the idea of Critical Thinking in any lesson.  ( Do not teach this skill in isolation. How does is work with a lesson, stem activity, project built, etc. What does Critical Thinking look like in the online or blended environment? Think of online discussions.)
• Post a Critical Thinking Poster in the room.  (This poster could be a copy of a rubric or even a list of “I Can Statements”. Point it out before a critical thinking activity.
• Make Critical Thinking part of your formative  and summative assessment.   (Move around the room, talk to groups and students, stop the whole group to make adjustments.)
• Point out Critical Thinking found in the content standards.  (Be aware that content standards often have words like; infer, debate, conclude, solve, prioritize, compare and contrast, hypothesize, and research. Critical Thinking has always been part of the standards. Show your students Bloom’s Taxonomy and post in the room. Where are they in their learning?
• Plan for a school wide emphasis.  (A culture that builds Critical Thinking is usually bigger then one classroom. Develop school-wide vocabulary, posters, and initiatives.)

I keep talking about the idea of surface learning and deeper learning. This can best be seen in  Bloom’s Taxonomy. Often we start with Remembering.  This might be essential in providing students the map to the further areas of Bloom’s. Of course, we then find the idea of Understanding. This is where I believe critical thinking begins. Sometimes we need to critically think in order to understand. In fact, you might be this doing right now. I believe that too much time might be spent in Remembering, which is why students get a false idea of what learning really is. As we look at the rest of Bloom’s ( Apply, Analyze, Evaluate, and Create) we can see the deeper learning take place. and even steps toward the transfer and internalization of the learning. Some educators even tip Bloom’s upside down, stating that the Creating at the top will build an understanding. This must be done with careful facilitation and intentional scaffold to make sure there is some surface learning. After-all, Critical Thinking will need this to build on.

I have been mentioning rubrics and assessment tools through out this post. To me, these are essential in building that culture of critical thinking in the classroom. I want to provide you with some great resources that will give your some powerful tools to assess the skill of Critical Thinking.  Keep in mind that students can also self assess and journal using prompts from a Critical Thinking Rubric.

Seven Resources to Help with Assessment and Facilitation of Critical Thinking

• Habits of Mind  – I think this is an awesome place to help teachers facilitate and assess critical thinking and more. Check out the  free resources page  which even has some wonderful posters. One of my favorites is the rubrics found on this  research page . Decide on spending some time because there are a lot of great resources.
• PBLWorks  – The number one place for PBL in the world is at PBLWorks. You may know it as the BUCK Institute or BIE. I am fortunate to be part of their National Faculty which is probably why I rank it as number one. I encourage you to visit their site for everything PBL.  This link brings you to the resource area where you will discover some amazing  rubrics to facilitate Critical Thinking. You will find rubrics for grade bands K-2, 3-5, and 6-12. This really is a great place to start. You will need to sign up to be a member of PBLWorks. This is a wonderful idea, after-all it is free!
• Microsoft Innovative Learning  – This   website  contains some powerful rubrics for assessing the 21st Century skills. The link will bring you to a PDF file with Critical Thinking rubrics you can use tomorrow for any grade level. Check out this  two page document  defining the 4 C’s and a  movie  giving you even more of an explanation.
• New Tech School  – This amazing PBL group of schools provide some wonderful Learning Rubrics in their free area.  Here you will find an interesting collection of rubrics that assesses student learning in multiple areas. These are sure to get you off and started.
• Foundation for Critical Thinking  –  Check out this  amazing page  to help give you descriptors.
• Project Zero  – While it is not necessarily assessment based, you will find some powerful  routines for making thinking visible . As you conduct these types of activities you will find yourself doing some wonderful formative assessment of critical thinking.
• Education Week  – Take a look at this resource that provides some great reasoning and some interesting links that provide a glimpse of critical thinking in the classroom.

Critical Thinking “I Can Statements”

As you can see, I believe that Critical Thinking is key to PBL, STEM, and Deeper Learning. It improves Communication and Collaboration, while promoting Creativity.  I believe every student should have these following “I Can Statements” as part of their learning experience. Feel free to copy and use in your classroom. Perhaps this is a great starting place as you promote collaborative and powerful learning culture!

• I can not only answer questions, but can also think of new questions to ask 
• I can take time to see what I am thinking to promote even better understanding 
• I can attempt to see other peoples’ thinking while explaining my own 
• I can look at a problem and determine needed steps to find a solution 
• I can use proper collaboration skills to work with others productively to build solutions 
• I can set a goal, design a plan, and persevere to accomplish the goal. 
• I can map out strategies and processes that shows the action involved in a task. 
• I can define and show my understanding of a concept, model, theory, or process. 
• I can take time to reflect and productively critique my work and the work of others 
• I can understand, observe, draw inferences, hypothesize and see implications.

cross-posted at  21centuryedtech.wordpress.com

Michael Gorman oversees one-to-one laptop programs and digital professional development for Southwest Allen County Schools near Fort Wayne, Indiana. He is a consultant for Discovery Education, ISTE, My Big Campus, and November Learning and is on the National Faculty for The Buck Institute for Education. His awards include district Teacher of the Year, Indiana STEM Educator of the Year and Microsoft’s 365 Global Education Hero. Read more at  21centuryedtech.wordpress.com .

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Critical thinking for 21 st -century education: A cyber-tooth curriculum?

• Published: 29 October 2014
• Volume 44 , pages 559–574, ( 2014 )

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It is often assumed that the advent of digital technologies requires fundamental change to the curriculum and to the teaching and learning approaches used in schools around the world to educate this generation of “digital natives” or the “net generation”. This article analyses the concepts of 21 st -century skills and critical thinking, to understand how these aspects of learning might contribute to a 21 st -century education. The author argues that, although both critical thinking and 21 st -century skills are indeed necessary in a curriculum for a 21 st -century education, they are not sufficient, even in combination. The role of knowledge and an understanding of differing cultural perspectives and values indicate that education should also fit local contexts in a global world and meet the specific needs of students in diverse cultures. It should also fit the particular technical and historical demands of the 21 st century in relation to digital skills.

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Higgins, S. Critical thinking for 21 st -century education: A cyber-tooth curriculum?. Prospects 44 , 559–574 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11125-014-9323-0

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Career and Technical Education (CTE) | 21st Century Skills

What Are 21st Century Skills?

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March 14th, 2024 | 11 min. read

Brad Hummel

Coming from a family of educators, Brad knows both the joys and challenges of teaching well. Through his own teaching background, he’s experienced both firsthand. As a writer for iCEV, Brad’s goal is to help teachers empower their students by listening to educators’ concerns and creating content that answers their most pressing questions about career and technical education.

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21st Century skills are 12 abilities that today’s students need to succeed in their careers during the Information Age.

The twelve 21st Century skills are: 

• Critical thinking

Collaboration

Communication.

• Information literacy
• Media literacy
• Technology literacy

Flexibility

Productivity.

• Social skills

These skills are intended to help students keep up with the lightning pace of today’s modern markets. Each skill is unique in how it helps students, but they all have one quality in common: they are essential in the age of the internet.

On this page, we’ll take a look at what’s included in 21st Century skills, how they help students, and why they’re so important.

You'll also be able to download a free guide on how you can teach 21st Century skills in middle or high school courses.

To start, let's dive into the three categories within 21st Century skills.

The Three 21st Century Skills Categories

Each 21st Century skill is broken into one of three categories:

• Learning skills
• Literacy skills
• Life skills

Learning skills (the four C’s) teach students about the mental processes required to adapt and improve upon a modern work environment.

Literacy skills (IMT) focuses on how students can discern facts, publishing outlets, and the technology behind them. There’s a strong focus on determining trustworthy sources and factual information to separate it from the misinformation that floods the Internet.

Life skills (FLIPS) take a look at intangible elements of a student’s everyday life. These intangibles focus on both personal and professional qualities.

Altogether, these categories cover all twelve 21st Century skills that contribute to a student’s future career.

This is not an exhaustive checklist of career readiness and employability skills — but they're the career readiness skills that overlap with 21st Century skills!

Let’s take a closer look at each category.

Category 1. Learning Skills (The Four C’s)

The four C’s are by far the most popular 21st Century skills. These skills are also called learning skills .

More educators know about these skills because they’re universal needs for any career. They also vary in terms of importance, depending on an individual’s career aspirations.

The 4 C's of 21st Century Skills are:

• Critical thinking : Finding solutions to problems
• Creativity : Thinking outside the box
• Collaboration : Working with others
• Communication : Talking to others

Below, we'll consider each of these skills and their implications for students' careers.

Critical Thinking

Critical thinking is one the most important qualities for today's professionals to have.

In the classroom, effective critical thinking inspires students to solve problems and make new discoveries. It’s what helps students figure things out for themselves when they don’t have a teacher at their disposal.

In business settings, critical thinking is essential for improvement. It’s the mechanism that eliminates obstacles and replaces them with fruitful endeavors.

Creativity is equally important as a means of adaptation. This skill empowers students to see concepts in a different light, which leads to innovation.

In any field, innovation is key to the adaptability and overall success of a company.

Learning creativity as a skill requires someone to understand that “the way things have always been done” doesn't necessarily inspire progress or growth. It's the realization that change may be necessary to solve problems with innovative solutions.

Collaboration means getting students to work together, achieve compromises, and get the best possible results from solving a problem.

Collaboration may be the most difficult concept in the four C’s. But once it’s mastered, it can bring companies back from the brink of bankruptcy.

The key element of collaboration is willingness. All participants have to be willing to sacrifice parts of their own ideas and adopt others to get results for the company.

That means understanding the idea of a “greater good,” which in this case tends to be company-wide success.

Finally, communication is the glue that brings all of these educational qualities together.

Communication is a requirement for any company to maintain profitability. It’s crucial for students to learn how to effectively convey ideas among different personality types.

That has the potential to eliminate confusion in the workplace, which makes your students valuable parts of their teams, departments, and companies.

Effective communication is also one of the most underrated soft skills in the United States. For many, it’s viewed as a “given,” and some companies may even take good communication for granted.

But when employees communicate poorly, whole projects fall apart. No one can clearly see the objectives they want to achieve. No one can take responsibility because nobody’s claimed it.

Without understanding proper communication , students in the 21st Century will lack a pivotal skill to progress in their careers.

But the four C’s are only the beginning. 21st Century skills also require students to understand the information that’s around them.

Category 2. Literacy Skills (IMT)

Literacy skills are the next category of 21st Century skills.

They’re sometimes called IMT skills, and they’re each concerned with a different element of digital literacy and comprehension.

The three 21st Century literacy skills are:

• Information literacy : Understanding facts, figures, statistics, and data
• Media literacy : Understanding the methods and outlets in which information is published
• Technology literacy : Understanding the machines that make the Information Age possible

Let's consider these three interrelated skills and how they help learners navigate the world we live in.

Information Literacy

Information literacy is a foundational skill. It helps students understand facts, especially data points, that they’ll encounter online.

More importantly, it teaches them how to separate fact from fiction.

In an age of chronic misinformation, finding truth online has become a job all on its own. It’s crucial that students can identify honesty on their own. Otherwise, they can fall prey to myths, misconceptions, and outright lies. 

Media Literacy

Media literacy is the practice of identifying publishing methods, outlets, and sources while distinguishing between the ones that are credible and the ones that aren’t.

Just like the previous skill, media literacy is helpful for finding truth in a world that’s saturated with information.

This is how students find trustworthy sources of information in their lives. Without it, anything that looks credible becomes credible.

But by becoming media literate, students can discern which media outlets or formats to ignore. They also learn which ones to embrace, which is equally important.

Technology Literacy

Last, technology literacy goes another step further to teach students about the machines involved in the Information Age.

As computers, cloud programming, and mobile devices become more important to the world, the world needs more people to understand those concepts.

Technology literacy gives students the basic information they need to understand what gadgets perform what tasks and why. This understanding removes the intimidating feeling that technology tends to have.

After all, if you don’t understand how technology works, it might as well be magic. But technology literacy unmasks the high-powered tools that run today’s world.

As a result, students can adapt to the world more effectively. They can play an important role in its evolution and guide its future.

But to truly round out a student’s 21st Century skills, they need to learn from a third category, one that influences them personally as well as professionally.

Category 3. Life Skills (FLIPS)

Life skills is the final category.   Also called FLIPS, these skills all pertain to someone’s personal life, but they also bleed into professional settings.

The five 21st Century life skills are:

• Flexibility : Deviating from plans as needed
• Leadership : Motivating a team to accomplish a goal
• Initiative : Starting projects, strategies, and plans on one’s own
• Productivity : Maintaining efficiency in an age of distractions
• Social skills : Meeting and networking with others for mutual benefit

Together, the five life skills help ensure that a person can lead a successful and independent life both personally and professionally.

Flexibility is the expression of someone’s ability to adapt to changing circumstances.

This is one of the most challenging qualities to learn for students because it’s based on two uncomfortable ideas:

• Your way isn’t always the best way
• You have to know and admit when you’re wrong

That’s a struggle for a lot of students, especially in an age when you can know any bit of information at the drop of a hat.

Flexibility requires them to show humility and accept that they’ll always have a lot to learn — even when they’re experienced.

Still, flexibility is crucial to a student’s long-term success in a career. Knowing when to change, how to change, and how to react to change is a skill that’ll pay dividends for someone’s entire life.

It also plays a big role in the next skill in this category.

Leadership is someone’s penchant for setting goals, walking a team through the steps required, and achieving those goals collaboratively.

Whether someone’s a seasoned entrepreneur or a fresh hire just starting out, leadership applies to their career.

Entry-level workers need leadership skills for several reasons. The most important is that it helps them understand the decisions that managers and business leaders make.

Then, those entry-level employees can apply their leadership skills when they’re promoted to middle management (or the equivalent). This is where 21st Century skill learners can apply the previous skills they’ve learned.  

It’s also where they get the real-world experience they need to lead entire companies.

As they lead individual departments, they can learn the ins and outs of their specific careers. That gives ambitious students the expertise they need to grow professionally and lead whole corporations.

True success also requires initiative, requiring students to be self-starters.

Initiative only comes naturally to a handful of people. As a result, students need to learn it to fully succeed.

This is one of the hardest skills to learn and practice. Initiative often means working on projects outside of regular working hours.

The rewards for students with extreme initiative vary from person to person. Sometimes they’re good grades. Other times they’re new business ventures. Sometimes, it’s spending an extra 30 minutes at their jobs wrapping something up before the weekend.

Regardless, initiative is an attribute that earns rewards. It’s especially indicative of someone’s character in terms of work ethic and professional progress.

That goes double when initiative is practiced with qualities like flexibility and leadership.

Along with initiative, 21st Century skills require students to learn about productivity. That’s a student’s ability to complete work in an appropriate amount of time.

In business terms, it’s called “efficiency.” The common goal of any professional — from an entry-level employee to a CEO — is to get more done in less time.

By understanding productivity strategies at every level, students discover the ways in which they work best while gaining an appreciation for how others work as well.

This equips them with the practical means to carry out the ideas they determine through flexibility, leadership, and initiative.

Still, there’s one last skill that ties all other 21st Century skills together.

Social Skills

Social skills are crucial to the ongoing success of a professional. Business is frequently done through the connections one person makes with others around them.

This concept of networking is more active in some industries than others, but proper social skills are excellent tools for forging long-lasting relationships. While these may have been implied in past generations, the rise of social media and instant communications has changed the nature of human interaction.

As a result, today’s students possess a wide range of social skills. Some are more socially adept than others. Some are far behind their peers. And some lucky few may be far ahead, as socializing comes naturally to them.

But most students need a crash course in social skills at least. Etiquette, manners, politeness, and small talk still play major roles in today’s world. That means some students need to learn them in an educational setting instead of a social setting. For them, it’s another skill to add to their lives.

Now that we’ve established what 21st Century skills are let’s answer the next big question: do employers actually want people with 21st Century skills?

What Is the Demand for 21st Century Skills?

While 21st Century skills have always been important, they’ve become essential in a worldwide market that moves faster by the day.

These skills all double back to one key focus: a person's ability to enact and/or adapt to change. 

This is because any industry is capable of changing at a moment’s notice. Industries are now regularly disrupted with new ideas and methodologies. Those industries that haven’t been disrupted aren’t immune; they just haven’t been disrupted yet.

With that in mind, the world has entered an era where nothing is guaranteed. As a result, students need to learn to guide the change that’ll inundate their lives. At the very least, they need to learn how to react to it. Otherwise, they’ll be left behind.

This is especially true as customer demand accelerates in all industries, along with expectations for newer features, higher-level capabilities, and lower prices.

In today’s marketplace, falling behind means becoming obsolete. That’s a familiar concept to all of today’s students as tomorrow’s advancements make today’s breakthroughs seem quaint or unimpressive.

Today, the only consistency from year to year is change. That's why many teachers like you are incorporating the 21st Century Skills Assessment into their career readiness courses.

When you teach 21st Century skills , your students will have the adaptive qualities they need to keep up with a work environment that’s constantly evolving.

How Do You Teach 21st Century Skills?

Now you know what 21st Century skills are and why employers want new hires to have them. So how do you teach them in your daily classes?

Before getting into the details, it's important to identify who should teach 21st Century skills.

While these skills can be taught at any grade level, we find it's most important to teach 21st Century skills in middle or early high school.

This is the time when your students need to hone their career readiness skills before they enter the workforce!

So how can middle and high school teachers teach 21st Century skills effectively?

Integrating 21st century skills into education systems: From rhetoric to reality

Subscribe to the center for universal education bulletin, ramya vivekanandan rv ramya vivekanandan senior education specialist, learning assessment systems - gpe secretariat.

February 14, 2019

This is the third post in a series about  education systems alignment in teaching, learning, and assessing 21st century skills .

What does it mean to be a successful learner or graduate in today’s world? While in years past, a solid acquisition of the “three Rs” (reading, writing, and arithmetic) and mastery in the core academic subjects may have been the measure of attainment, the world of the 21 st century requires a radically different orientation. To participate effectively in the increasingly complex societies and globalized economy that characterize today’s world, students need to think critically, communicate effectively, collaborate with diverse peers, solve complex problems, adopt a global mindset, and engage with information and communications technologies, to name but just a few requirements. The new report from Brookings, “ Education system alignment for 21st century skills: Focus on assessment ,” illuminates this imperative in depth.

Recognizing that traditional education systems have generally not been preparing learners to face such challenges, the global education community has increasingly talked about and mobilized in favor of the changes required. This has resulted in a suite of initiatives and research around the broad area of “21st century skills,” which culminated most notably with the adoption of Sustainable Development Goal 4 and the Education 2030 agenda, including Target 4.7, which commits countries to ensure that learners acquire knowledge and skills in areas such as sustainable development, human rights, gender equality, global citizenship, and others.

In this landscape, Global Partnership for Education (GPE) has a core mandate of improving equity and learning by strengthening education systems. GPE supports developing countries, many of which are affected by fragility and conflict, to develop and implement robust education sector plans. Depending on the country, GPE implementation grants support a broad range of activities including teacher training, textbook provision, interventions to promote girls’ education, incentives for marginalized groups, the strengthening of data and learning assessment systems, early childhood education, and many other areas.

This work is buttressed by thematic work at the global level, including in the area of learning assessment. The strengthening of learning assessment systems is a strategic priority for GPE because of its relevance to both improving learning outcomes and ensuring effective and efficient education systems, which are two of the three key goals of the GPE strategic plan for the 2016-2020 period . The work on learning assessment includes the Assessment for Learning (A4L) initiative, which aims to strengthen learning assessment systems and to promote a holistic measurement of learning.

Under A4L, we are undertaking a landscape review on the measurement of 21st century skills, using a definition derived from Binkley et. al . and Scoular and Care :

“21st century skills are tools that can be universally applied to enhance ways of thinking, learning, working and living in the world. The skills include critical thinking/reasoning, creativity/creative thinking, problem solving, metacognition, collaboration, communication and global citizenship. 21st century skills also include literacies such as reading literacy, writing literacy, numeracy, information literacy, ICT [information and communications technologies] digital literacy, communication and can be described broadly as learning domains.”

Using this lens, the landscape review examines the research literature, the efforts of GPE partners that have been active in this space, and data collected from a sample of countries in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia in regard to the assessment of these skills. These research efforts were led by Brookings and coordinated by the UNESCO offices in Dakar and Bangkok. As another important piece of this work, we are also taking stock of the latest education sector plans and implementation grants of these same countries (nine in sub-Saharan Africa and six in Asia), to explore the extent to which the integration of 21st century skills is reflected in sector plans and, vitally, in their implementation.

Though the work is in progress, the initial findings provide food for thought. Reflecting the conclusions of the new report by Brookings, as well as its earlier breadth of work on skills mapping, a large majority of these 15 countries note ambitious objectives related to 21st century skills in their education sector plans, particularly in their vision or mission statements and/or statements of policy priorities. “Skills” such as creativity and innovation, critical thinking, problem-solving, decisionmaking, life and career skills, citizenship, personal and social responsibility, and information and communications technology literacy were strongly featured, as opposed to areas such as collaboration, communication, information literacy, and metacognition.

However, when we look at the planned interventions noted in these sector plans, there is not a strong indication that countries plan to operationalize their intentions to promote 21st century skills. Not surprisingly then, when we look at their implementation grants, which are one of the financing instruments through which education sector plans are implemented, only two of the 15 grants examined include activities aimed at promoting 21st century skills among their program components. Because the GPE model mandates that national governments determine the program components and allocation of resources for these within their grant, the bottom line seems to echo the findings of the Brookings report: vision and aspiration are rife, but action is scarce.

While the sample of countries studied in this exercise is small (and other countries’ education sector plans and grants may well include integration of 21st century skills), it’s the disconnect between the 15 countries’ policy orientation around these skills and their implementation that is telling. Why this gap? Why, if countries espouse the importance of 21st century skills in their sector plans, do they not concretely move to addressing them in their implementation? The reasons for this may be manifold, but the challenges highlighted by the Brookings report in terms of incorporating a 21 st century learning agenda in education systems are indeed telling. As a field, we still have much work to do to understand the nature of these skills, to develop learning progressions for them, and to design appropriate and authentic assessment of them. In other words, it may be that countries have difficulty in imagining how to move from rhetoric to reality.

However, in another perspective, there may be a challenge associated with how countries (and the broader education community) perceive 21st century skills in general. In contexts of limited resources, crowded curricula, inadequately trained teachers, fragility, weak governance, and other challenges that are characteristic of GPE partner countries, there is sometimes an unfortunate tendency to view 21st century skills and the “basics” as a tradeoff. In such settings, there can be a perception that 21st century skills are the concern of more advanced or higher-income countries. It is thus no wonder that, in the words of the Brookings report, “a global mobilization of efforts to respond to the 21CS [21st century skills] shift is non-existent, and individual countries struggle alone to plan the shift.”

This suggests that those who are committed to a holistic view of education have much work to do in terms of research, sharing of experience, capacity building, and advocacy around the potential and need for all countries, regardless of context, to move in this direction. The Brookings report makes a very valuable contribution in this regard. GPE’s landscape review, which will be published this spring, will inform how the partnership thinks about and approaches 21st century skills in its work and will thereby provide a complementary perspective.

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Critical thinking is a 21st-century essential — here’s how to help kids learn it

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If we want children to thrive in our complicated world, we need to teach them how to think, says educator Brian Oshiro. And we can do it with 4 simple questions.

This post is part of TED’s “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from someone in the TED community; browse through all the posts here.

We all want the young people in our lives to thrive, but there’s no clear consensus about what will best put them on the path to future success. Should every child be taught to code? Attain fluency in Mandarin, Spanish, Hindi and English?

Those are great, but they’re not enough, says educator and teacher trainer Brian Oshiro . If we want our children to have flexible minds that can readily absorb new information and respond to complex problems, he says, we need to develop their critical thinking skills.

In adult life, “we all have to deal with questions that are a lot more complicated than those found on a multiple-choice test,” he says in a TEDxXiguan talk. “We need to give students an opportunity to grapple with questions that don’t necessarily have one correct answer. This is more realistic of the types of situations that they’re likely to face when they get outside the classroom.”

How can we encourage kids to think critically from an early age? Through an activity that every child is already an expert at — asking questions.

1. Go beyond “what?” — and ask “how?” and “why?”

Let’s say your child is learning about climate change in school. Their teacher may ask them a question like “What are the main causes of climate change?” Oshiro says there are two problems with this question — it can be answered with a quick web search, and being able to answer it gives people a false sense of security; it makes them feel like they know a topic, but their knowledge is superficial.

At home, prompt your kid to answer questions such as “ How exactly does X cause climate change?” and “ Why should we worry about it?” To answer, they’ll need to go beyond the bare facts and really think about a subject.

Other great questions: “ How will climate change affect where we live?” or “ Why should our town in particular worry about climate change?” Localizing questions gives kids, says Oshiro, “an opportunity to connect whatever knowledge they have to something personal in their lives.”

2. Follow it up with “How do you know this?”

Oshiro says, “They have to provide some sort of evidence and be able to defend their answer against some logical attack.” Answering this question requires kids to reflect on their previous statements and assess where they’re getting their information from.

3. Prompt them to think about how their perspective may differ from other people’s.

Ask a question like “How will climate change affect people living in X country or X city?” or “Why should people living in X country or X city worry about it?” Kids will be pushed to think about the priorities and concerns of others, says Oshiro, and to try to understand their perspectives — essential elements of creative problem-solving.

4. Finally, ask them how to solve this problem.

But be sure to focus the question. For example, rather than ask “How can we solve climate change?” — which is too big for anyone to wrap their mind around — ask “How could we address and solve cause X of climate change?” Answering this question will require kids to synthesize their knowledge. Nudge them to come up with a variety of approaches: What scientific solution could address cause X? What’s a financial solution? Political solution?

You can start this project any time on any topic; you don’t have to be an expert on what your kids are studying. This is about teaching them to think for themselves. Your role is to direct their questions, listen and respond. Meanwhile, your kids “have to think about how they’re going to put this into digestible pieces for you to understand it,” says Oshiro. “It’s a great way to consolidate learning.”

Critical thinking isn’t just for the young, of course. He says, “If you’re a lifelong learner, ask yourself these types of questions in order to test your assumptions about what you think you already know.” As he adds, “We can all improve and support critical thinking by asking a few extra questions each day.”

Watch his TEDxXiguan talk now:

About the author

Mary Halton is a science journalist based in the Pacific Northwest. You can find her on Twitter at @maryhalton

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Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World

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• The Future of Jobs and Jobs Training
• Theme 2: Learners must cultivate 21st‑century skills, capabilities and attributes

Table of Contents

• About this canvassing of experts
• Theme 1: The training ecosystem will evolve, with a mix of innovation in all education formats
• Theme 3: New credentialing systems will arise as self‑directed learning expands
• Theme 4: Training and learning systems will not meet 21st‑century needs by 2026
• Theme 5: Jobs? What jobs? Technological forces will fundamentally change work and the economic landscape
• Acknowledgments

Will training for the skills likely to be most important in the jobs of the future work be effective in large-scale settings by 2026? Respondents in this canvassing overwhelmingly said yes, anticipating improvements in such education will continue. However, when respondents answered the question, “Which of these skills can be taught effectively via online systems?” most generally listed a number of “hard skills” such as fact-based knowledge or step-by-step processes such as programming or calculation – the types of skills that analysts say machines are taking over at an alarming pace right now. And then, when asked, “What are the most important skills needed to succeed in the workplace of the future?” while some respondents mentioned lessons that might be taught in a large-scale setting (such as understanding how to partner with AI systems or how use fast-evolving digital tools) most concentrated on the need for “soft skills” best developed organically, mentioning attributes such as adaptability, empathy, persistence, problem-solving, conflict resolution, collaboration and people skills, and critical thinking.

Tough-to-teach intangibles such as emotional intelligence, curiosity, creativity, adaptability, resilience and critical thinking will be most highly valued

Learning will, in itself, become important. The skill to continue to learn will be important in all jobs Anonymous respondent

[how to use]

Overall, as these respondents foresee a big re-sorting of workplace roles for machines and humans, they expect that the jobs-related training systems of the future will often focus on adding or upgrading the particular capabilities humans can cultivate that machines might not be able to match.

An anonymous respondent ’s terse description of top future skills was echoed by many dozens of others in this study: “Learning will, in itself, become important. The skill to continue to learn will be important in all jobs.”

Susan M ernit , CEO and co-founder at Hack the Hood, explained, “At Hack the Hood, the tech-inclusion nonprofit I lead, the most valuable skill we teach low-income young people of color, ages 16-25, is that they have the ability and the discipline to learn harder and harder things – the most critical skill for the emerging workplace. Research shows that for our cohorts a blend of online and real-world learning is an effective mix.”

George McKee , a retiree, predicted, “As always, the most important skills will be the ability to learn and organize new things and to discriminate sense from nonsense. Public schools will continue to fall behind in their ability to foster these skills in large populations.”

Meryl Krieger , career specialist at Indiana University, Bloomington’s Jacobs School, replied, “The most important skills in the workforce of the future are 1) transferrable skills and 2) training in how to contextualize and actually transfer them. These are really hard to teach at scale, but then the workforce of the future is something we are barely coming to have the dimmest perceptions about.”

Jessica Vitak , an assistant professor at the University of Maryland, observed that the most-needed skills are capabilities that have always had value, writing, “As much as people like to imagine the future being heavily reliant on robots and high-tech gadgets, I don’t see too much of the workforce shifting dramatically in terms of the skills required to complete tasks.”

Many of the skills of the future are hybrid skills – requiring expertise or fluency across some of our traditional domains. Trevor Hughes

Many other participants in this study said highly valued strengths of human character will be necessary to partner with technology in jobs of the future. An anonymous respondent wrote, “The increasing reach of data, automation and eventually AI will force those jobs that remain to require even greater human touch.”

Susan Price , a digital architect at Continuum Analytics, expanded on that point, explaining, “People will continue to prefer and increasingly value human nurses, teachers, writers, artists, counselors, ethicists and philosophers. This shift has been apparent over the past 20 years or so. As we have come to prefer ATMs over tellers and travel apps over travel agents, our patronage of other ‘human contact’ specialists such as counselors and therapists, personal trainers, manicurists, and massage therapists has increased. Example: People skills in user interface and experience design will be increasingly in demand, but will greatly benefit from artificial intelligence and machine learning for usability evaluations and testing. Another example: The role of truck drivers will need to evolve as they are replaced with self-driving transports. There will remain the need for humans to manage transportation tracking and auditing, perform problem-solving, and occupy stakeholder contact roles such as sales and customer support communication.”

Trevor Hughes , CEO at the International Association of Privacy Professionals, replied, “Training will indeed be an important part of preparing the workforce for our digital future, but it won’t be easy. Many of the skills of the future are hybrid skills – requiring expertise or fluency across some of our traditional domains. Take privacy as an example. Any digital economy professional needs to understand privacy and how it creates risk for organizations. But that means grasping law and policy, business management, and technology. Modern professionals will need to bridge all of these fields.”

An anonymous respondent replied, “The two trends with the most hype right now are AI and VR. Let’s assume that these technologies will have a large impact on the nature of the future work. The workforce of the future (that is not completely displaced by this tech) then needs the skills to utilize these technologies. Some broad skills I anticipate are interacting with machine learning systems, reasoning with underlying algorithms and embedded judgments, being comfortable delegating tactical decisions to those algorithms, etc.”

Michael Rogers, author and futurist at Practical Futurist, said, “In a rapidly changing work environment populated by many intelligent machines, we will need to train people from an early age in communication skills, problem-solving, collaboration and basic scientific literacy. Without those basics in place, occupational training is insufficient.”

The anonymous director of evaluation and research at a university ranked in the top 10 in the U.S. wrote, “Sure, Lynda.com and Udacity and others that can provide skills, just like the corporate training programs we use now. … But those skills won’t be the same as an education – as the habits of mind and social interleavings that make for the types of problem definition, interdisciplinary perspectives, and incisive thought that will be most needed – deep engagement with the stuff of distinctly human capabilities.”

Justin Reich , executive director at the MIT Teaching Systems Lab, observed, “The most important skills for the future will be the kinds of things that computers cannot readily do, places where human workers have a comparative advantage over computers. Two important domains of human comparative advantage are ill-structured problem solving and complex, persuasive communication. (Frank Levy and Richard Murnane’s ‘ Dancing with Robots ’ offers a nice summary of the research informing this position.) Ironically, computers are most effective at teaching and assessing routine tasks, the kinds of things that we no longer need human beings to do. Large-scale learning, which generally depends on automated assessment, is most effective at teaching the kinds of skills and routine tasks that no longer command a living wage in the labor market.”

An anonymous CEO for a nonprofit technology network argued that some “soft” skills can be taught, observing, “Many research reports have demonstrated that one of the most important skills in our developing workforce is reasoning and complex problem solving. The internet enables us to teach and practice these skills in a unique and appropriate way by connecting and engaging people across geographies, backgrounds, ages, etc.” And an anonymous professor at the University of California, Berkeley said, “I do think there will be a lot more online training in the future – and it will actually be more successful at teaching things that are not directly translatable to jobs (humanities subjects, such as art history, media studies, etc.) – the things that television documentaries are already good at teaching. I’m not sure that great writing skills or public speaking/presentation skills will be taught in this format.”

Alf Rehn , professor and chair of management and organization at Åbo Akademi University in Turku, Finland, responded, “The key thing to realize about skills and the future is that there is no one set of skills that we can identify as core or important. The future of skills is going to be one of continuous change and renewal, and any one special skill we can identify now will almost certainly be outdated in not too long. Creativity and critical thinking will be as important in the future as it is today, but beyond this we should be very careful not to arrogantly assume too much. And this is precisely why new programs, online and off, will be so crucial. Innovative, faster and more agile training systems will not only be helpful, they’ll be critical.”

An anonymous self-described “chief problem solver” said the world needs problem solvers, writing, “Huge portions of the human condition can be effectively learned through one-to-many learning environments enabled through the internet. Many cannot. … If you take a look at the prevalence of strong problem-solving skills in our society now versus 20 years ago, you’ll notice that an overwhelming majority are now quite specialized in their particular areas of interest/work, but on average have less ability than their counterparts 20 years ago to adequately handle new/incongruous/conflicting information or tasks. Instead of figuring it out and thereby training up our ingenuity-focused skills, we now tend to simply Google someone else’s answer. While this is ‘efficient’ in terms of getting to an adequate solution rapidly, it means that … people are not able to handle new inputs, be flexible, or actually puzzle out new problems.”

Many participants mentioned the general categories of communication and people skills. An anonymous respondent summed it up, writing, “No matter what kind of hard skills one comes to the workplace with, at the end of the day things always seem to boil down to people and communication challenges.”

Micah Altman , director of research at MIT Libraries, wrote, “Given the increased rate of technical change and the regular disruptions this creates in established industries, the most important skills for workforces in developed countries are those that support adaptability and which enable workers to engage with new technologies (and especially information and communication technologies) and to effectively collaborate in different organizational structures.”

No matter what kind of hard skills one comes to the workplace with, at the end of the day things always seem to boil down to people and communication challenges. Anonymous respondent

An anonymous technology analyst for Cisco Systems commented, “The gig economy takes over, and micro-skill training will come to the fore. Debate is a most important skill that can be taught online, emphasizing the importance of preparation.”

[there will be]

An anonymous respondent observed, “The job of the future is the one that combines technical, operational, managerial and entrepreneurial skills.”

Axel Bruns , professor in the Digital Media Research Center at Queensland University of Technology, wrote, “Over the past decade there has been a substantial growth in generic digital literacies training, and this is now being replaced or enhanced by literacies training in specific areas and for particular purposes (social media literacy for communication professionals, data literacy for journalists, etc., to name just two particularly obvious fields). There has also been the emergence of a range of specialist positions that address the cutting edge of such literacies – under job titles such as data scientist or computational journalist, for instance. Across the creative industries, and beyond, the possession of such skills will increasingly serve as a differentiator between job applicants, and within organisational hierarchies in the workplace. Those who possess these skills are also more likely to branch out beyond their core disciplines and industries, as many such skills are inherently interdisciplinary and enable the worker to engage in a wider range of activities. Beyond generic digital literacies, some of the key areas I see as important are: 1) platform-specific literacies, e.g., social media literacies; 2) data science, i.e., the ability to gather, process, combine, and analyse ‘big data’ from a range of sources; 3) data visualisation. Until the accreditation schemes for workers with these skills are standardised, which eventually they will be, we will continue to see leading workers in these areas … be able to enter the workplace on the basis of their demonstrated expertise and track record rather than on the basis of formal accreditation. While there are many MOOCs and other online courses now purporting to teach these skills, it is important to point out that there is a substantial qualitative component to these skills – somewhat paradoxically, perhaps, especially where they deal with ‘big data’: the engagement with such large datasets is less about simply generating robust quantitative metrics and more about developing a qualitative understanding of what such metrics actually mean . Such an understanding is difficult to teach through semi-automated online courseware; direct teacher/learner interaction remains crucial here.”

An anonymous vice president of product at a new startup commented, “In a grand folly of correlation being mistaken for causation, we’re trying to pipeline all kids into college to try to juice their earnings, while steering kids away from practical technical skills like manufacturing tech that might be a better fit, opting instead to saddle them with student loans for a degree they won’t finish from a school that no employer will respect.”

The consultant said one more skill that could be most critical: “An important skill for the workforce of the future is an ability to cultivate a strong network, so if your job disappears you’re able to quickly find a new role.”

[to choose]

Practical experiential learning via apprenticeships and mentoring will advance

Several experts wrote about the likelihood that apprenticeship programs will be refashioned offline and online via evolving application of human knowledge and technology tools. An anonymous security engineer at Square commented, “Never before in history has it been so easy for anyone to learn to become anything they want to be, and that will only continue to improve.”

Connecting the virtual to the physical will change everything. Will Kent

Cory Salveson , learning systems and analytics lead at RSM US, predicted, “There will be a big market for this: more self-directed or coached/mentored, project-based, online learning options that coexist with traditional brick-and-mortar university degree credentialing to make the labor market more agile, whether it wants to be or not.”

Will Kent , e-resources librarian at Loyola University-Chicago, replied, “Connecting the virtual to the physical will change everything. Anyone can learn anything online now. With the right kind of career or social positioning/privilege/luck/connections, users can sidestep traditional degree processes. For those in industries that still demand degrees as currency, the requirements for degrees will change, continuing education will become more embedded in the workplace or new types of evaluation will become more popular. Deliverable-based time constraints rather than 9-5, asynchronous offices/projects will be commonplace, and employers will have to make time for employees to self-educate or else they will fall behind. New credentialing systems will complement, not compete with, older iterations. One will not be favored above the other in practice (i.e., if you can do your work, no one will question how you learned what you learned).”

D. Yvette Wohn , assistant professor of information systems at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, wrote, “Knowledge can be acquired through massive online means, but skills will still require a small-group, personalized approach with much individual feedback. In the future, the technology will be advanced such that the modality – online or offline – is not the issue; rather, it is the size and intimacy of the learning environment that will matter. Formalized apprenticeships that require both technical skills and interpersonal interaction will become more important. As more people get degrees, university degrees will matter less, but that does not mean that higher education does not have its place. Schools that are able to provide a more holistic learning experience that does not focus on a specific skill but is able to provide students with an interdisciplinary and social experience will become more valuable.”

John B. Keller , director of e-learning at the Metropolitan School District of Warren Township, Indiana, wrote, “Online training will continue to improve, and … any skills or knowledge updating that can reasonably be delivered online will be. That said, there will still be a need in many areas for verifiable performance of complex skills and behaviors that may not be possible to be accomplished algorithmically. Skills demanded in the future will include analysis of big data sets, interpretation of trends within historic contexts, clear and effective intercultural communication, design and systems thinking, as well as the ability to advance and advocate for distinctly human contributions to progress and the advance of culture. As more and more skills are broken down into repeatable processes, they will be handed off to technology and video as key transfer platforms. The demand for skills that cannot be easily transferred via online systems will ensure that experience, mentorship, coaching, apprenticeship and demonstrated proficiency all have prominent roles to play against a backdrop of online learning.”

An anonymous respondent wrote, “Online classes can teach prerequisite knowledge that can prepare workers for further hands-on training or apprenticeship.”

[I include]

Some respondents believe mentoring does not have to be in person – in the traditional face-to-face sense – to be one-to-one. In fact, they say the online world has already multiplied the number of available mentors in every subject.

Valerie Bock , VCB Consulting, former Technical Services Lead at Q2 Learning, responded, “To develop proficiency, we seem to need exposure to war stories of others who were there when the usual rules didn’t apply. MIT’s … EdX platform has a code checker built in, which means well-structured classes can be created with automatically graded exercises supplemented by discussion forums where students can ask their questions and move past places where they are stuck. These courses actually provide the coaching learners need to become skillful. So yeah, coding is probably a skill that can be taught and credentialed effectively via a self-directed online course. In the meantime, a lot of coders learn their craft informally, by examining code written by others and asking questions about it. To me, the most promising application of the internet is the way it increases the number of potential mentors. Global organizations are already leveraging the asynchronous properties of online venues to put their subject matter experts in touch with mentees half the world away, spanning time and distance obstacles. … People use the internet every day, informally, to learn bits and pieces that help them be more effective in the work (paid and unpaid) they do, sometimes by accessing content, but often by contacting other people. The value added to human welfare by parenting forums, elder care discussions, recipe exchanges, addiction recovery communities and even stain removal resources is deeply underestimated.”

Ed Dodds , digital strategist at Conmergence, added, “The global startup ecosystem and makerspace ecosystem will both be intersecting and growing in parallel. … More intentional formal mentorship networks (guilds) are likely to proliferate.”

“What would help,” added an anonymous respondent , “is improving people’s efficiency at providing supports to others. Sort of Slack on steroids.”

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News Literacy: Critical-Thinking Skills for the 21st Century

Three methods for teaching critical thinking skills and smart media consumption habits to a generation growing up in a climate of information overload.

Every teacher I've worked with over the last five years recalls two kinds of digital experiences with students.

The first I think of as digital native moments , when a student uses a piece of technology with almost eerie intuitiveness. As digital natives, today's teens have grown up with these tools and have assimilated their logic. Young people just seem to understand when to click and drag or copy and paste, and how to move, merge and mix digital elements.

The second I call digital naiveté moments , when a student trusts a source of information that is obviously unreliable. Even though they know how easy it is to create and distribute information online, many young people believe -- sometimes passionately -- the most dubious rumors , tempting hoaxes (including convincingly staged encounters designed to look raw and unplanned ) and implausible theories .

How can these coexist? How can students be so technologically savvy while also displaying their lack of basic skills for navigating the digital world?

What to Believe?

Understanding this extends beyond customary generational finger wagging. While it's tempting to blame students themselves for failing to think critically, we should remember that the digital revolution represents one of the most radical changes in human history.

Students today face a greater challenge in evaluating information than their parents or grandparents did at their age. The cumulative amount of information that exists on the planet, from the beginning of recorded history to the present, is, by realistic estimates , doubling every two years. And even though digital natives have grown up in the information age, many of the adults and institutions in their lives are still grappling with its implications. In other words, it's likely that the kind of credulity we see in young people reflects our own collective uncertainty about what we encounter on the digital frontier. Finally, the skills that students need to effectively sort fact from fiction are often missing from school curricula.

This isn't to suggest any shortcoming on the part of today's teachers. Without the classroom time, quality teaching materials and professional development opportunities in the emerging field of news literacy , teachers cannot reasonably be expected to guide their students to achieve these new skills.

News literacy is a relatively new field in media studies that focuses on defining and teaching the skills that citizens need to evaluate the credibility of the information they encounter, and on examining the role that credible information plays in a representative democracy.

It's also a subject that most students find inherently engaging and relevant. In fact, a recent study found that 84 percent of young people between the ages of 15 and 25 say they would benefit from learning these skills.

3 Exercises in News Literacy

But the question for teachers remains: "How can I integrate news literacy into my classroom amid so many other priorities, standards and goals?" I'd like to share three accessible ideas for how to do so.

Reinvent Current Events

Have students collect examples of information that they feel is timely and important. Then lead a discussion about who produced the content and for what purpose. Is it intended to inform? Persuade? Entertain? Sell? Create small groups and assign each a key characteristic of credibility to study:

• Quality sourcing
• Verification
• Word choice
• Documentation

Then have each team lead an assessment of its assigned attribute. Consider writing a group letter to the reporter, creator or editor about items that are either exemplary or problematic.

Explore the Power of Information

Pose an "essential question for the day" that explores the power and impact of information (e.g., "What changes would we see in the U.S. if the First Amendment protections of speech and press were repealed?"). Then use such websites as the Committee to Protect Journalists or Reporters Without Borders to examine press freedoms around the world. Track the number of journalists jailed, kidnapped or killed in 2014, and investigate the circumstances surrounding these incidents.

Fact-Checking Challenge

Display a different example of dubious information each week or month and challenge your students to research its accuracy using non-partisan fact-checking resources and advanced web searching . Give prizes or extra credit to those who get it right, or work collaboratively to seek answers as a class.

The Practice of Critical Thinking

Not only can these ideas be adapted to explore a range of relevant issues in a variety of academic subjects and grade levels, they also embody the principles of 21st century learning and are aligned with Common Core State Standards .

News literacy education has the potential to engage students and ignite their critical thinking. More importantly, it can empower them to make better-informed choices in their lives as they move beyond the classroom and into the world.

For more information about the News Literacy Project, including our free online professional development session this spring, visit our website .

• Critical Thinking

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Student Performance Through 21st-Century Skills: Integrating Critical Thinking, Communication, Teamwork, and Creativity in Modern Education

Posted: 30 Aug 2024

Rujonel Cariaga

Department of Education

Date Written: August 12, 2024

Globalization, quick technological advancement, and the necessity of individuals who can think critically, communicate clearly, collaborate effectively with others, and be creative (the 4Cs) define the demands of the twenty-first century. Our schools must adapt to these requirements. We must cease depending so much on inflexible, set-in-stone instructional approaches and replace them with more flexible, skill-based methods suitable for a future we have yet to learn about. The COVID-19 epidemic is driving more classes and examinations conducted online. This emphasizes the need for robust, flexible educational institutions to manage such issues. While some instructors need more training, some children perform well, and others do not. Local educational systems have to cope with these all-around issues. Regarding the instructors and the tools they use for learning, schools in the country and those in the city differ greatly. More major problems causing students to do poorly on their work include stress before examinations and online proctoring systems failing as they used to be. Problems in the neighborhood that aggravate these include socioeconomic ones influencing entrance into the justice system and the school. Furthermore, people dislike the unequal application of STEM education, which compromises the 21st-century competencies of pupils. Research on best teaching and assessing 21st-century skills in many environments still needs to be completed. This article will examine the 4Cs, teacher independence, and professional development today in light of one another. The aim is to uncover evidence capable of influencing educational policy and practice. Understanding this will help political leaders and educators create better classrooms for every child. Every child will do better in school, enabling them to prepare for difficult circumstances ahead. Researchers must understand how 21st-century abilities influence students' performance in various spheres, including math if they are to create decent educational strategies. Since they determine how well college students do in the classroom, 21st-century skills are applicable at all academic levels. People discuss many issues related to student performance in the twenty-first century, including student knowledge and performance, teacher performance and behavior, technology, and integrated learning approaches, curriculum development policies and plans, and the necessity of significant legislative reforms. Six distinct approaches to viewing and analyzing education assist us in grasping its current dynamics. DiBenedetto and Myers (2016) see things differently regarding preparing children for the year 2000. Williams (2021) explores how federal and state policies may help bridge the achievement disparity among early children by linking policy initiatives to school performance. Many authors have commented on the problems that result from applying contemporary education in various global locations. Voogt and Roblin published a study in 2010 on 21st-century talents. The two guys discussed the difficulties of teaching Latin American children more in 2007. People will consider the issues and opportunities schools worldwide have to handle.

Keywords: Communication, Critical Thinking, Creativity, Teamwork, Student Performance

Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation

Rujonel Cariaga (Contact Author)

Department of education ( email ).

Philippines

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CRITICAL THINKING AS A 21st CENTURY SKILL: CONCEPTIONS, IMPLEMENTATION AND CHALLENGES IN THE EFL CLASSROOM

This qualitative research explores the conceptions, implementation and challenges of critical thinking in the FL classroom. 24 Libyan EFL university instructors participated in this study though completing an open-ended questionnaire sent via FB messenger. The content analysis applied to the participants’ answers revealed different conceptions and misconceptions of critical thinking. It also revealed that the majority of the participants implemented critical thinking in different aspects of their teaching. Some social, cultural and administrative barriers limited the effectiveness of this implementation. Nevertheless, the development of this kind of thinking for 21 st century EFL learners is a necessity, not an option.

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