Measuring Communication and Collaboration Skills in Sciences of Secondary School Students in New General Curriculum: A Case of Vietnam

Abstract

Communication and collaboration are important skills for students in the 21st century. In order to develop these skills, students will interact with others in specific situations, where they will need to face a situation directly. In Vietnam, the new general education curriculum was issued by the Ministry of Education and Training in 2018. This curriculum has been developed using competency-based approach. Communication and collaboration are identified as core competencies in this curriculum, and these competencies have been proposed with detail components and criteria for students at the final stage of each education levels (e.g., primary, lower secondary and upper secondary education). However, one of the practical problems teachers and students facing is that these criteria are too general. Therefore, it is difficult for teachers and teachers to monitor and assess these competencies in specific subjects. The purpose of the present research is to propose a detailed assessment framework and to validate an instrument for assessing communication and collaboration competencies in the Science subject based on general criteria of these competencies in the general education curriculum in Vietnam. The present research used Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) to analyse the research data. The results show that there are three components to measure communication and collaboration competencies with 19 out of 20 indicators having good factor loadings. Reliability analysis for each factor using Cronbach’s alpha shows that each factor has internal consistency, with values ranging from .704 to .861.