Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills project

Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills project aims to develop globally standardised ICT-based assessment for school education which emphasise the use of ICT. The project came from a Call to Action by Cisco, Intel and Microsoft in January 2009. An example used in the call has students using the web to help solve a problem. What will be a bit disconcerting for education traditionalists is the spelling mistake "poplation" in the example.

It would be easy to dismiss ATC21S as self interest by computer companies wanting to sell computer hardware and software to schools. What might be reassuring (or not) is that the project is headed by Professor Barry McGaw at the University of Melbourne, with other academics from the University of California, Berkeley, University of Szeged, Hungary, University of Washington,and University of Toronto.

ATC21S has Working Groups on:

1. 21st Century Skills
2. Methodological Issues
3. Technological Issues
4. Classroom Learning Environments and Formative Evaluation
5. Frameworks for New Assessments