The Challenges of Assessing 21st Century Competencies

Jan 22, 2025

Skills Like Collaboration and Ethical Thinking Are Difficult to Define, Teach

Students need 21st century competencies, such as critical thinking and creativity, to succeed in school, work and civic life. But many schools struggle to define, teach and assess them. A new report from the Center explores this terrain and offers practical guidance for policymakers and educators. The authors of the report—Chris Brandt, Carla Evans and Chris Domaleski—sat down recently to talk about it with the Center’s editorial director, Catherine Gewertz.

Q: Why did you three write this paper?

Carla: When we think about the goals of education, they’re often lifelong learning, or that our children can thrive in a changing economic and workforce climate. But when it comes to how we teach these things, and how we define or measure them, there’s often a lot of head-scratching and confusion.

I wanted to write a paper about assessing and measuring these competencies because I have more concerns about how it could go wrong than how it could go right. Just being able to gather evidence—that’s what assessment is, from a very colloquial perspective—about what students know and can do for the purposes of giving them feedback.

Chris Brandt: We want to prepare students for the future, and these competencies are what employers want. They want to know that students can perform in particular contexts and apply skills to solve specific problems. The current way of doing assessment often doesn’t get at that. It doesn’t allow students to demonstrate what they really know and can do.

We have this paradigm of assessment as high stakes, where a student sits down and takes a test and then they get a score. But real meaningful assessment goes far beyond that. It’s really about giving students specific, targeted feedback about what they did well and where they can improve. That’s what we’re seeing in a lot of these performance assessments that are associated with 21st century competencies.

Chris Domaleski: There’s an increasing recognition that students need more than academic skills in K-12 and beyond to succeed. Technology and artificial intelligence put a lot of information at our fingertips, and we’re right to think about how humans apply that knowledge to solve complex, meaningful problems to create solutions.

That leads us to a set of what we call 21st century competencies. Frankly, policymakers are asking for more clarity about how to cultivate these skills in schools, and to monitor the extent to which students are developing them and progressing. We wanted to add our voice to help respond to those calls from policymakers.

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

Defining 21st Century Competencies

Q: One of the things you discuss in the paper is the difficulty of defining 21st century competencies (what some might call skills). What definition do you propose in the paper? What kinds of skills fall under that umbrella?

Chris Brandt: In the paper, we use the OECD’s definition: “The knowledge, skills and attitudes necessary to be successful for living and working in the 21st century global knowledge economy, to participate appropriately in an increasingly diverse society, to use new technologies effectively, and to adapt to change and uncertainty.”

We use this as our working definition because it highlights the interrelationships among knowledge, skills, attitudes and behaviors.

Carla: We probably spent more time debating the term—skills? competencies?—than writing the entire paper. [laughs] We still don’t think we landed on the perfect term.

Chris Brandt: Yeah. But we chose the word “competencies” as our umbrella because it’s more inclusive than just “skills.”

These competencies go by a lot of different umbrella names: 21st century skills, durable skills, non-cognitive skills, transferable skills. We’re talking about things like analytical thinking, critical thinking, creative thinking, ethical thinking, self-regulation, collaboration, complex communication. There are also social-emotional learning skills like resilience and persistence.

Guidance for Assessing 21st Century Competencies

Q: Some policymakers are considering using assessments of 21st century competencies for high-stakes decisions. What thoughts do you have on that?

Chris Domaleski: Those of us who wrote the paper are generally skeptical about high-stakes uses of direct measures of 21st century competencies. And by that I mean things like including measures in consequential school accountability systems.

We really wanted to shift the focus to providing advice to help cultivate, measure, and monitor those skills starting at the class and school level, with the support of districts and states. And we do think they play a role in this endeavor.

We named the challenges—and they are not insignificant—of creating direct measures of these 21st century competencies. We think that over time, our capacity in this area will mature, and it may be more appropriate to think later about applications that we are reluctant to endorse in the near term.

Our take on this is that the greater the stakes, the higher the demand for evidence. We’re urging policymakers and practitioners to really invest in collecting that evidence in a very systematic and responsible way before they think about those high-stakes usages.

‘Stop and Ask Why’

Q: What do each of you hope people will take away from this paper?

Chris Brandt: We wrote this for policymakers, but I think there’s a lot in here that classroom teachers can take from this. My hope is that this paper will provide teachers with a foundation of confidence and knowledge that can help if they want to start teaching these skills.

Carla Evans: Rather than jumping to accountability and high-stakes uses, I hope people stop and ask why they would do that, and what could potentially go wrong. Why would we go right to holding people accountable and reporting on this in a way that says, ‘you’re better at collaboration,’ or ‘you’re not good at collaboration’?

I hope people stop and ask which competencies do we want to prioritize? How do we teach and help students to develop them, and provide high quality feedback, and protect this environment, this learning culture, from becoming just another testing culture that works at cross purposes with our true goal of helping to develop critical, collaborative and creative students?

Chris Domaleski: There are three takeaways that I would want to make prominent. And the first is what I’ll call construct clarity. It’s essential to invest the time to understand and define what we care about under this umbrella of 21st century competencies.

We throw around words like perseverance, self-efficacy and creativity, and I think we know that those are built on a complex set of skills that interact and overlap. But we need to invest the time in understanding what it is that we care about, and how it develops in students.

The second thing I’d lift up is the importance of attending to inputs as well as outcomes, to think about how the investments we make can really help build these skills in students and not go right to monitoring outcomes.

The third is the importance—when we do get to the measurement side—of following a principled measurement process. In this paper, we’re building on generations of research on good assessment practice. We’re trying to point to what we think are long-standing, research-based practices and apply them to these competencies. Use a principled process to develop these measures.

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