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 holisticallyPsychologists 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.
Deploy time-efficient teamwork and collaboration assessmentsAdministrators 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…