2. What are Life Skills?

In identifying life skills, it is useful to define what they should represent. As a start, one can be clear about what they do not represent. For example, many factors can contribute to one's success in life, but not all of them can be considered "skills." People often attribute their success to such factors as luck, socioeconomic status, physical and social surroundings, fate, or divine intervention. While we do not deny the importance of any of these factors, they are well beyond the scope of ALL. Furthermore, although skills and abilities related to strength, fitness, and physical dexterity have traditionally been important to success in life, ALL chose to exclude any explicit treatment of physical abilities.

It is also important to emphasize that life skills must be connected to success in life. There are many skills, talents, and abilities that do not meet this criterion, even though they may involve sophisticated intellectual processes. This means that not all academic abilities are necessarily life skills, nor are all life skills are likely to be taught in school. This criterion also means that one must recognize that these skills will not be the same—or will not be valued equally—in even a limited range of cultural settings. For instance, one expects that cross-cultural differences in life skills may echo the research on the concept of intelligence. As Sternberg and Kaufman (1998) point out in their review of related literature, at the extreme Western cultures tend to emphasize "technological intelligence" (Mundy-Castle, 1974), generalization or going beyond the information given (Connolly and Bruner, 1974; Goodnow, 1976), speed (Sternberg, 1985a), minimal moves to a solution (Newell and Simon, 1972), and creative thinking (Goodnow, 1976). In Eastern cultures, by contrast, Buddhist and Hindu philosophies stress waking up, noticing, recognizing, understanding, and comprehending, in addition to determination, mental effort, and feelings (Das 1994). African conceptions of intelligence focus on skills that help facilitate and maintain harmonious and stable inter-group relations (Ruzgis and Grigorenko, 1994). But, even in the more limited range of countries included in OECD, variation in how skills are valued is expected.

It is important to note that such variation does not preclude measurement of the underlying skill. Provided that the assessment embodies sufficiently robust theory, that the assessment design affords good coverage of the intended content domain and that the statistical techniques employed to summarize proficiency compensate for the various sources of "missing" data then assessments such as ALL can provide valid, reliable, comparable and interpretable profiles of skill. One of the explicit goals of ALL is, in fact, to explore the variation in how different economies value the skills assessed, how these differences influence the social distribution of economic, social, educational and health outcomes observed at the individual level and at the macro level and how valuations are amplified or attenuated by relative conditions of supply and demand.