Soft skills are also known as those social and emotional skills that complement technical skills and are crucial for each person’s personal and professional success. In a labor market in which competitiveness increases, the ability to work in a team, adaptability or problem solving in a changing and globalized context is increasingly valued. All of them […] … learn more→
Tag Archives: Assessment

Assessment, a soft skill?

A-level and GCSE cancellation: a missed opportunity to rethink assessment
GCSE and A-level exams in England have been cancelled, opening the door to a repeat of the confusion that marked the award of grades in 2020. The cancellation of exams in March 2020 in England was followed by the realisation that an algorithm created to moderate the data provided by schools had led to significant reduction […] … learn more→

Note his pizza delivery man or his taxi driver: for once, would school be the way of reason?
When it comes to assessment, would the school get wise while the rest of society goes mad? We note, in fact, the coexistence of two movements in opposite directions. One, concerning school evaluations, which strives to better explain the objects of evaluation (new programs, core competencies ), advocates a more reasonable use of marks (or even a deletion of marks ), […] … learn more→

How to rethink assessment in higher education
The international rankings of universities are today a reality of globalization which sheds a different light than the historical reputation of institutions or the evaluation reports produced on them. They are based on purely quantitative comparative performance elements that must be interpreted within their scope: what data are used? What are the indicators? What are the calculation algorithms? […] … learn more→

What will happen to school grades during the coronavirus pandemic?
COVID-19 has brought a tsunami of change and impacted every facet and sector of society, including the lives of children, parents and teachers. UN Secretary-General António Guterres recently said that the coronavirus pandemic is the biggest global challenge since the Second World War. When K-12 schools will reopen in Canada remains an open question, and hope […] … learn more→

Evidence-based education needs standardised assessment
The latest Gonski review aims to improve evidence-based decision-making in Australian school education. It recognises that governments’ educational investment must be based on more than politics, just as teachers’ instructional decisions must be based on more than intuition. Like other professional sectors, Australian education must be guided by rigorous evidence of what works, for whom and in […] … learn more→
Does assessment make Colleges better? Let me count the ways
Erik Gilbert’s recent commentary\”Does Assessment Make Colleges Better? Who Knows?\” raises an important question about the value of assessment. As one who has worked in education for 15 years and dutifully assessed learning in his classes, Gilbert now wonders if that measurement has been a worthwhile use of time. He’s not certain that the tweaks […] … learn more→
Does assessment make Colleges better? Who knows?
Last year the younger of my two sons went off to college. As we went through the search process, we looked at university and department websites, checked faculty research interests, looked for evidence of faculty involving students in their research, flinched at the prices, marveled at the climbing walls, and considered quality of the food […] … learn more→
The outcome of assessment
Perhaps because we have come to assess businesses through the “bottom line,” that is, through numbers, we have begun to feel that everything can and should be quantifiable. We put grades on restaurants, as though a spot check can really tell us how safe the food is to eat (it can’t). We put grades on […] … learn more→
Diploma of Community Services Work
This Diploma of Community Services Work is a non-industry full-time course offered to international students. … learn more→