Design Considerations For 21st Century Educational Assessments

Workplaces now require people with more non-routine skills such as problem solving, creativity, critical thinking, communication, collaboration and teamwork. This shift is mainly due to the working requirements, as organisation sought in their employees for more interpersonal skills. There is considerable debate that the knowledge and skills exposed by traditional education are no longer seen as adequate preparation for success in life. Moreover, conventional educational intervention and assessment methods are not often adequately able to deal with complex skills. These 21st century skills usually involve problem solving, creative and critical thinking, decision making and collaboration (Binkley et al, 2012). As a response to rising demands on what and how today's students should learn to become productive citizens, many national and international initiatives have contributed on understanding and developing innovative methods and techniques on how to teach and scaffold these skills among individuals. Approaches for assessing and measuring 21st century skills are resource intensive and time-consuming effort (Awwal, 2015). Given the growing importance of 21st century skills in most fields, educational systems are challenged to successfully prepare students for future. Innovative approaches are required to measure such complex skillsets. Games are being advocated by many researchers as a suitable medium for such purposes. Games can be designed to efficiently measure salient skills that are otherwise difficult to capture by traditional methods. Using available technology this paper will emphasise the design considerations for 21st century educational assessments with examples of Collaborative Problem Solving (CPS) skills measurement process that can be used as a general template to work as broader design standards in developing assessments for the new century. Much of the findings on suitable design considerations for complex game-like assessments discussed here are drawn from experiences of the involved researchers during the deployment of the research study ATC21S.