Moving forward : 21st century assessment skills By: DARYL D. ARiOLA

Assessment is a vital part of today’s educational system. It serves as an individual evaluation system and as a way to compare performance across a spectrum and across populations. The assessment goals are to gather relevant information about student performance or progress, determine student interests, and make judgments about their learning process. After receiving this information, teachers can reflect on each student’s level of achievement and specific inclinations of the group to customize their teaching plans.

Thus, the new mission of schools is to prepare students to work at jobs that do not yet exist and create ideas and solutions for products and problems that have not been identified using technologies that have not yet been invented.

To attain this, there are top skills our learners must develop and values needed for future work. Our learners should have analytical, critical thinking, and analysis of the problem. They should possess active learning strategies, creativity, originality, and initiative to gather and evaluate ideas. Leadership and social influence, service-oriented with resiliency, stress tolerance, persuasion, and balanced emotional intelligence to negotiate and troubleshoot technology use in monitoring and control and user experience on systems analysis and evaluation.

The Big Question is: Have we prepared our learners to face future problems? The world and individuals’ issues will come with increasing rapidity, complexity, and diversity. The problems of increasing quantity and difficulty, newer problems and shorter time frame for solutions, more global (larger-scale) problems requiring integrated solutions, and the Need for “BIG MAD” Professionals.

Identifying the characteristics of 21st Century Assessment helps us answer the question. A 21st-century assessment must be flexible, responsive, integrated, have multiple methods, informative systemic, technically sound, and well communicated. These are the needed characteristics of our 21st-century assessment that will substantially impact our learners as they survive their education in this pandemic.( Contributed article)