is one of the most ubiquitous terms in today's education debates. Proponents point to a new workforce reality that demands a next generation of college students and workers who are independent thinkers, problem solvers, and decision makers. Public schools, they argue, must focus not just on imparting the basics, but equally so on ensuring that students gain a suite of newly important thinking and reasoning skills. Widely cited by national education groups, teacher unions, higher education organizations, and workforce development groups as an imperative for today's students, these skills are also gaining steam with policy makers. The governors and chief state school officers of at least 10 states have committed to revising standards for teaching and learning and to create new assessments that reflect the need for 21st-century skills (Gewertz 2008). But critics levy strong arguments against the push for these skills. They decry so-called 21st-century skills as a meaningless term and a distraction from the more important work of teaching core content. There is nothing new about these skills, they say, and emphasizing them will water down standards and weaken teaching. All the more, they argue, these types of higher-order skills cannot be measured in reliable, cost-effective, or scalable ways. Assessment is a curious driver in the 21st-century skills debate. But it may well be one of the best opportunities to bridge the skills-content divide that has emerged from the push and push-back of the 21st-century skills movement. Emerging assessment models offer some of the most promising examples of how, at once, education can integrate skills and content. ANY-CENTURY SKILLS An emphasis on what students can do with knowledge, rather than what units of knowledge they have, is the essence of 21st-century skills. But it's no wonder that the term seems vague or confusing. There are hundreds of descriptors of the skill set, including life skills, workforce skills, interpersonal skills, applied skills, and noncognitive skills. Even more definitions exist for the individual skills that fall under the broader category of 21st-century skills. In defining technology literacy, for instance, various education organizations and businesses list information science skills, digital media fluency, advanced computer, and Internet communications, as well as the newborn term technacy--a deep knowledge of technological systems. The century-specific label is also misleading. Knowing how to think critically, analytically, and creatively are not skills specific or unique to the 21st century (much of the same has been argued by philosophers and educators from ancient Socrates to 20th-century John Dewey). Such calls, however, have intensified in the past two decades as the nature of the economy and work has changed. Richard Murnane and Frank Levy, both economists and professors at Harvard and MIT, respectively, have been researching and writing about the evolution of the workforce for more than a decade. Work that requires only routine skills, they've found, is now more often done by computers (Murnane and Levy 2004). Today's workers in nearly all sectors of the economy must be able to find and analyze information, often coming from multiple sources, and use this information to make decisions and create new ideas. 21st-century skills, then, are not new, just newly important. TEACHING THE SKILLS Imparting these newly relevant skills is not an option or an add-on. Studies by national and international research organizations, including the National Research Council, OECD, and the International Society for Technology in Education, have shown that complex thinking and analytical skills are an integral part of learning at every stage of development (Bransford, Brown, and Cocking 1999; OECD 2004; Kozma 2003). The notion that skills and content are best learned together is also one of the major findings of a recent report on mathematics education, funded and released by the U. …