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

SW
For the Swedish partner the MASS success criteria coincide with the general success criteria
of the programme in which the MASS pilot took place, which means that 15% of the
students should be in work or studies three months after the course.
In the partner’s assessment plan, apart from the above stated success criterion,
measurement “…if participants learn something” about soft skills, through a questionnaire,
is stated. However, neither what “learning” mean is specified nor details about the
questionnaire and its application is given.
An additional self-evaluation attempt through proposed methodology is reported.
RO
The base methodology followed by the Romanian partner, apart from teachers’ judgments,
is the use of two questionnaires, for self-esteem measurement, by to Rosenberg (Rosenberg,
1989), and an emotional intelligence measurement one, by Goleman (“Utne Test,” n.d.).
They are both well-known and well established test. The Romanian partner carried out the
MASS pilot in the framework of counselling classes. The chosen tests are well known and
previously used by the teachers of these classes, psychologists in specialty.
The tests were addressed before the beginning and after the end of the MASS course and
they results were compared.
An additional criterion is the active participation of students during the course, judged by
their teachers.
Rosenberg’s self-esteem test
The Rosenberg self-esteem scale (Rosenberg, 1989), developed by Dr. Morris Rosenberg, is a
widely-used self-esteem measure in social science research. It is a ten item questionnaire,
with items answered on a 4-point scale — from strongly agrees to strongly disagree. Five of
the scale items have positively worded statements and five have negatively worded ones.
The scale measures state self-esteem by asking the respondents to reflect on their current
feelings.
NL
For the pilot NL partners developed a list of criteria, based on the assessment competences
of junior vocational education and training. This was done because the students have
worked with this list before. The list includes the following criteria:
1. I make a plan of approach before starting
2. I can plan my activities
3. I stick to my plan
4. I pay attention to what I do
5. I am open minded to a different opinion
6. I like to work with others
7. Others like to work with me
8. I feel stress easily
9. I like to participate in activities
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