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21st Century Skills

Within the last few years, a growing consensus of education ministries around the world have acknowledged that students need a new set of skills to succeed in the 21st century. The ability to think critically, problem solve, gather information, communicate, and collaborate using 21st century tools are now prerequisites for participating in today's workforce and global society. Preparing schools, teachers, and students to meet this demand requires new sets of tools, assessments, and strategies for teaching and learning.

CCT staff who have played prominent roles in this domain include Shelley Pasnik and Harouna Ba.

• Snapshot 1
  Extending our efforts to help educators shape practices to meet 21st century demands, CCT is working with Cisco Systems to develop and test a series of indicators that monitor change in how educational systems prepare administrators, teachers, and students. This research builds on our ongoing evaluation of the Cisco 21S Initiative, a large-scale reform effort bringing technology and professional development to schools in Mississippi and Louisiana.
• Snapshot 2
  Working with the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, CCT documented current assessments of 21st century skills in the U.S. and abroad in a report written for policy, education and business leaders. In addition to identifying assessments, the report defined key terms and outlined strategic recommendations for current and future development efforts. In conjunction with the report's release, CCT also created a web-based repository to host background information on all assessments of 21st century skills, both existing and in development.
• Snapshot 3
  Multimedia authoring, such as students' use of PowerPoint, is a communication skill similar to traditional text-based writing that must be taught. While teachers and students have become more technically savvy in using multimedia tools, they often lack the language to determine appropriate uses of an image or a sound. To support such conversations in classroom practice, CCT built a set of web-based resources for teaching and assessing digital literacy at the classroom level.