21st-century skills and their relationship to STEAM learning environments: A review

Abstract

The development of the so-called 21st century skills is currently mentioned as one of the key objectives that education systems must achieve throughout the world, so that citizens as a whole can adapt adequately to the labor market and in general, to the future society. The purpose of this review is, given the explosive and growing interest in this topic, to identify the various definitions of the skills of the 21st century and then to recognize the relationships that can be found between these skills and STEAM learning environments, which recently have been proposed as suitable scenarios for developing them. The study was developed as a systematic literature review based on abstracting and in-depth reading of 153 scientific articles published in journals indexed in Scopus and Scielo. The results of the study suggest that, in order to guide the development of 21st century skills, it is convenient to consider when designing STEAM learning environments, issues such as the change in the assessment towards a more formative experience, the inclusion of collaborative and social environments, the use of research-based learning strategies and gamification and games, among others.