8. Connecting the findings: A proposed Life Skills framework for the ALL study

In the preceding sections, attempts from two widely different fields to describe skills or abilities that people need to succeed in life were examined. In both cases, a variety of documents were reviewed and frameworks of categories based on convergence around certain skills and abilities were drawn from them. With regard to the documents from which they were drawn, the frameworks are judged to be fairly complete: no commonly accepted skills, abilities, or categories were omitted. It would seem safe to assume, therefore, that they could accommodate most of the theories and models in their respective fields.

It is perhaps no surprise that these two efforts with seemingly similar topics reach such very different conclusions. They do, after all, take very different approaches in examining human abilities. The employability skills models look at the skills required by the many tasks that people face in the workplace and create general categories that are applicable across a variety of situations. The psychological models, on the other hand, look at only the type of thinking in which people commonly engage, with little regard to the context. Neither approach is inherently wrong; both can be considered appropriate given the different interests and perspectives of the fields from which they originate. If the major difference between the two is one of perspective, and the two approaches are indeed talking about a the common concept of life skills, or at least something roughly comparable to it, then an examination of life skills should be enhanced by incorporating both of these perspectives.

The All study designers propose that the relationship between the two models is as follows:

The skills derived from the employability skills literature are the context areas in which the four types of thinking derived from the psychological theories take place; and conversely, in each of the skill categories, people can engage in primarily four types of thinking represented by the four categories derived from the psychological theories. This relationship is represented by the matrix in Figure 2.

According to this proposed relationship, the skills within a skill area can be classified by the type of thinking they involve. Taking the example of mathematical skills, crystallized mathematical skills, such as recalling mathematical facts and formulas, easily come to mind. Fluid mathematical skills might allow a person to solve mathematical problems, whereas practical mathematical skills would enable a person to apply his/her mathematical skills to a situation found on the job. Finally, creative mathematical skills might, for example, allow a person to design a mathematical solution for a seemingly non-mathematical situation. Each of these cases occurs in mathematics; yet there are clear differences among them.

If one looks at the four types of thinking, providing an example of any one of them requires describing a context, such as using creative thinking to develop a new software application, or using fluid thinking to select an appropriate dosage of medicine based on the instructions on the package. The examples might describe a highly specialized situation, such as identifying a faulty part on an airplane engine or writing a computer program to predict seismographic activity. In the vast majority of cases, however, they all can be described, at some level, by a skill found within the skills categories derived from employability skills studies.