Assessing 21st Century Skills: A Guide to Evaluating Mastery and Authentic Learning

by Laura M. Greenstein

Go beyond traditional paper-and-pencil tests! How can you measure student mastery of 21st century skills like creativity, problem solving, and use of technology? Laura Greenstein provides a framework and practical ideas for using authentic learning experiences and rigorous assessment strategies to engage today’s students. With numerous rubrics and checklists, a step-by-step model for developing your own classroom assessments, a lesson planning template, and sample completed lesson plans, this book discusses how to teach and assess:

Genres: Education

264 pages, Paperback

First published May 29, 2012

Reviews

[Gordon Eldridge · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book starts with a comparison of various sets of 21st century skills from other sources, then provides the author's own taxonomy of skills divided into three broad categories - thinking skills, acting skills and living skills. Then chapter by chapter the author goes through the various subcategories under each of these three broad categories, explains the importance of the skill set, gives examples of the way they can be embedded in assessments and some tools for assessing them.

While there are some occasional nuggets of worthwhile ideas in the book, in general it is really quite superficial. It is obviously written for teachers who are still only assessing knowledge and pretty much only using traditional tests to do this. If the reader is any further advanced in their thinking about pedagogy and assessment than this, they will find this book pretty uninteresting.

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Greenstein has written a fine synthesis of the current research on assessing 21st century skills century skills. The narrative both gives a fine overview of the research and remains accessible to the average reader. The piece that was most useful to this reader is the articulation of 21st century skills in a series of rubrics in the appendices. A good guide book to begin thinking about assessment of a broader range of educational outcomes.