Abstract
Despite a shift in educational landscape towards more competence-based pedagogies that focus on developing students' higher order thinking skills, there remains a dearth of pragmatic measures to evaluate the skills deemed desirable in emerging curricula. The “Student Instrument for measuring Confidence in ‘Key Skills'” (SICKS) is based on a pre-existing, teacher-focused instrument. SICKS can be used to assess post-primary students' (ages 12 - 19) confidence levels across six variables corresponding to what are commonly designated ‘key skills': communication, collaboration, critical thinking, creativity and innovation, self-direction, and technology for learning. This paper presents the rationale for the development of the instrument, and a psychometric analysis of its validity.It also reports on preliminary analysis of responses of 507 students from 20 schools, demonstrating the power of the instrument to provide insightful information for practitioners and policymakers. Gender differences and disparities between socio-economic groups in their confidence levels were revealed, as were the positive implications that increased confidence in key skills may have on students' wellbeing, aspirations, and other experiences in school.
Highlights
The necessity to prepare young people for full participation in a rapidly changing society has been noted by educational policy makers at an international level (Shear, Novais, Means, Gallagher, & Langworthy, 2009), leading to increased emphasis being placed on the development of higher order thinking, and ‘key skills', known as ‘21st Century skills and competencies' (Ananiadou & Claro, 2009)
In order to explore possible factors that might account for some of the variance in students' levels of confidence with key skills, and to ascertain relationships between such confidence levels and students' experiences in school, this section first provides a descriptive overview of the data before looking at analysis of variance by gender and school type, and exploring relationships through correlation and regression analysis
The picture that has emerged as a result of the data analysis in this paper indicates that the stereotypical disparity between the confidence levels of male and female students persists in many areas (Beyer & Bowden, 1997; Jakobsson, Levin, & Kotsadam, 2013), with male students reporting higher confidence with communication, creativity, critical thinking, and using technology for learning
Summary
The necessity to prepare young people for full participation in a rapidly changing society has been noted by educational policy makers at an international level (Shear, Novais, Means, Gallagher, & Langworthy, 2009), leading to increased emphasis being placed on the development of higher order thinking, and ‘key skills', known as ‘21st Century skills and competencies' (Ananiadou & Claro, 2009). A number of reasons have been cited for the lack of uptake of these new pedagogies, including a lack of resources, inadequate professional development, and systemic difficulties relating to curriculum and assessment (Bray, Bauer, & Oldham, 2018; Euler & Maaß, 2011). According to Fullan and Langworthy (2014): ‘One of the biggest systemic challenges to the spread of the new pedagogies is that they are not yet being measured in any coherent way' (p 9). The work presented in this paper aims to go some
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
