Perspectives on methodological issues

Abstract

In this chapter the authors have surveyed the methodological perspectives seen as important for assessing twenty-first century skills. Some of those issues are specific to twenty-first century skills, but the majority would apply more generally to the assessment of other psychological and educational variables. The narrative of the paper initially follows the logic of assessment development, commencing by defining constructs to be assessed, designing tasks that can be used to generate informative student responses, coding/valuing of those responses, delivering the tasks and gathering the responses, and modeling the responses in accordance with the constructs. The paper continues with a survey of the strands of validity evidence that need to be established, and a discussion of specific issues that are prominent in this context, such as the need to resolve issues of generality versus contextual specificity; the relationships of classroom to large-scale assessments; and the possible roles for technological advances in assessing these skills. There is also a brief segment discussing some issues that arise with respect to specific types of variables involved in the assessment of twenty-first century skills. The chapter concludes with a listing of particular challenges that are regarded as being prominent at the time of writing. There is an annexure that describes specific approaches to assessment design that are useful in the development of new assessments.