Draft white paper 1: defining 21st century skills

The Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills (ATC21S) project was conducted by the University of Melbourne and funded by Cisco, Intel, Microsoft, and the founder countries, Australia, Finland, Singapore and the US. This white paper is one of a number written to form the basis for subsequent work on the ATC21S project. It outlines high-priority 21st-century skills with examples of how they apply to real-world situations. It also investigates examples of assessment tasks and scoring rubrics that would provide evidence of students' levels of mastery.

The authors have organised the 10 skills identified into four groupings: (1) ways of thinking - creativity and innovation; critical thinking, problem solving, decision making; learning to learn, metacognition; (2) ways of working - communication; collaboration (teamwork); (3) tools for working - information literacy; information and communications technology (ICT) literacy; and (4) living with the world - citizenship (local and global); life and career; personal and social responsibility (including cultural awareness and competence). Show less