Teaching and Assessing Soft Skills - MASS - Measuring and ...

Factors for choosing an assessment
There are several and varied methods to assess soft skills, one system will not suit all
(Dewson, Eccles, Tackey, & Jackson, 2000). What may work well for a particular situation and
institute a may not work for another. The system of choice and it implementation depends
very much on the activities and objectives, the target group, the course duration, and the
available resources.
Assessment design and soft skills definitions
The importance of an appropriate and meaningful definition of the skills to be assessed
cannot be overstated (Wilson et al., 2010). The success of any attempt to assess them will
rely on these definitions and their elaborations in terms of descriptions of emerging
understandings for the design and selection of the assessment instruments and activities,
and the appraisal of the products of the assessments.
The task of defining the different soft skills is not an easy one. As mentioned above, the
definitions will have to address questions such as: the unit of analysis (are they intended to
reflect individuals, large groups or both?); the age span of these skills (will they be confined
to obligatory, upper secondary, higher education or beyond?); whether the definitions are to
be universal or susceptible to cultural differences; and whether the skills are to be defined as
domain-general or closely associated with specific contexts or disciplines.
These are just some of the questions that need to be addressed by the definition of each
skill, and the response to these questions will play a determining role in the delineation of
the inferences that can be drawn from the assessment process. In other words, the
definition of the constructs will determine the kind of information that will be collected. It
will therefore constrain the inferences that different stakeholders will be able to make based
on the results of the assessment process.
Considering the overwhelming amount of possible elements involved in each definition,
where can we start the construction of models of proficiency that can serve as a solid base
for assessment?
Current literature in the field of educational assessment stresses that any measurement
should be rooted in a robust cognitive theory and a model of the learner that informs, not
only what counts as evidence of mastery, but also what kind of tasks can be used to elicit
them (Pellegrino et al., 2001).
Domain dependence vs domain independence
When defining constructs for measurement, a key question that can arise is the degree to
which any particular context will influence measures of the construct (Wilson et al., 2010).
However, with soft skills, the context can be quite distal from the constructs. For instance, if
communication is considered, it can be measured within numerous subject matter areas.
Communication skills in mathematics, involving a quantitative symbolic system,
representations of data patterns, and so forth, is different than communication skills in, for
instance, second-language acquisition, where mediation and meaning-making must occur
across languages. On the other hand, some underlying aspects may be the same for
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