Measuring K-12 Students’ Soft Skills

Copious research finds student soft skills development predicts future career and academic outcomes. Administrators who wish to develop nonacademic, soft skills for students must find a way to measure student performance on nonacademic skills and target interventions accordingly. This report highlights publicly available, time efficient, researched-back assessments of four key soft skills: cultural empathy, teamwork and collaboration, communication, and environmental stewardship.

In a 2016 Gallup and Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA) national poll only about 10 percent of teachers stated that their schools or school districts measure students’ soft skills “very well.”

Assess student cultural awareness and empathy holistically

Psychologists state that it is more important for students to learn how to view situations and events from the perspective of another culture (i.e., cultural empathy), rather than only learn content knowledge about other cultures (i.e., cultural awareness). To that end, administrators can use the Global Empathy Scale to measure students’ ability to understand the world from another culture’s perspective. Administrators can also assess how students interact with students from other cultures and how students understand other individual student perspectives via the Assessment of Social Perspective-Taking Performance.

70%+

of teachers and school administrators think students spend too much time on both academic and non-academic assessments

Deploy time-efficient teamwork and collaboration assessments

Administrators can either ask teachers to complete student teamwork skill evaluations or ask students to complete self-assessments on student teamwork skills. Administrators can give Wang et al.’s (2009) holistic assessments to either students or teachers to evaluate students’ communication skills depending on their district’s specific time burdens (e.g., if students spend too much time on assessments, deploy teacher evaluations). Ideally, administrators should deploy assessments to both students and teachers. If administrators rely on student self-assessments alone, students’ inflated views of their own performance may bias assessment results. Similarly, if administrators rely on teacher assessments alone,teacher bias against individual students may impact results.

Assess verbal and writing communication skills

Administrators can use two separate assessments (e.g., the Personal Report of Communication Apprehension, the Writing Apprehension Test) to measure students’ verbal and written abilities communication abilities, respectively.

Student assessments like these not only help administrators gauge students’ overall communication skills, but also allow students to see and understand what criteria teachers use to grade their communication skills.

For example, if a student must indicate whether or not she gets tense or rigid when she speaks in front of the class on an assessment, she knows that teachers may evaluate her on body language during a presentation.

Ensure students achieve the sequential goals of environmental stewardship

Administrators can use the environmental literacy ladder from Planet Blue at the University of Michigan to track student progress towards environmental stewardship. The environmental literacy ladder accounts for five stages of developing environmental stewardship in students:

By measuring student performance on different rungs of the environmental literacy ladder, administrators can assess how students’ environmental knowledge and attitudes towards sustainability translate into actions related to environmental stewardship.