12. Measuring Life Skills

The ultimate purpose of the proposed life skills framework is to help guide the assessment efforts of the ALL project. Due to the variety of work being done in the area of assessing life skills and cognitive abilities, the assessment efforts within the ALL project could follow very different paths. The proposed framework provides a unifying direction for assessment efforts by establishing a limited set of life skills to be assessed and by establishing relationships among life skills according to their skill area and the type of thinking involved. Having a vision for what an ideal set of assessments would look like not only ensures consistency in development, but also assists in gauging progress along the way.

The proposed framework requires that any assessment efforts be viewed in terms of two characteristics: the type of skill assessed (e.g., reading, teamwork) and the type of thinking assessed (e.g., crystallized, creative). Doing so makes the development of assessments all the more challenging, as efforts to assess just one characteristic are themselves incomplete. As described earlier, there have been many efforts to identify employability skills, but few of the projects have assessment efforts associated with them. Assessments measuring different types of thinking ability have a considerably longer history, but conventional methods primarily focus upon crystallized and fluid thinking, while assessments of practical and creative abilities are less well developed and not commonly accepted.

Not surprisingly, if we compare existing ALL assessment efforts with the proposed framework, they only address a fairly limited range of life skills.

Several potential domains did not meet the criteria for inclusion set out earlier and were dropped from consideration for the current cycle of assessment. Thus ALL attempted to develop detailed assessment frameworks, test blueprints and performance assessment items in the following seven areas:

Prose Literacy (PL)—focuses on the knowledge and skills needed to understand and use information from texts that contain extended prose organized in a typical paragraph structure found in materials such as editorials, news stories, brochures and pamphlets, manuals, and fiction.

Document Literacy(DL)—focuses on the knowledge and skills required to locate and use information in qualitatively different printed materials that contain more abbreviated language and use a variety of structural devices to convey meaning. These include tables, charts, graphs, indices, diagrams, maps, and schematics.