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

From the above discussion it is obvious that there appears to be considerable confusion over
how generic skills should be defined, what they look like within each discipline and therefore
how they should be taught, assessed and evaluated, and how their adoption should
ultimately shape teaching practices.
Autonomous vs. intermixed teaching
There are two schools of thought concerning the teaching and development of ‘soft skills’
(Moore, 2004): the ‘generalists’ and the ‘specifists’. The generalists first came to the fore in
the 1970s and believe that soft skills are indeed generic, and can therefore be taught
separately from content and applied to any discipline. For example generalist approach
argues that the attribute of critical thinking is universal, so it can be taught independently as
a set of cognitive processes then applied to any context. By contrast, specificists argue that
attributes, such as the ability to think critically, cannot be separated from their disciplinary
context. Knowledge is seen as fundamentally situated. From this perspective, critical
thinking cannot be taught separately from a students’ chosen discipline/s as a ‘one-shot
inoculation’ of skill development.
The debate regarding the nature of graduate attributes or skills has become more, rather
than less fine-grained over time. There is disagreement even amongst those ‘relativists’ who
sit in the middle of the generalist and specifist positions. Some argue that a generic attribute
such as critical thinking needs to be learned contextually, but once learned, can be
transferred to another context. Yet, more recently, Davies (2006) has argued that those on
either side of the generalist/specifist divide must move beyond the ‘fallacy of the false
alternative’ (p.179), by recognising the possibility of both general and specific attributes. For
Davies, students should learn ‘general skills’ – ‘the principles of good reasoning simpliciter’,
which can then be ‘used and deployed in the service of the academic tribes’ (p.179).
However, it is difficult to see how the ‘the principles of good reasoning simpliciter’ can be
taught in a context-free environment.
The specifist/relativist approach seems to be strengthening by the recognition that soft skills
are much more difficult to be transferred in practise than hard skills (Georges, 1996; Laker &
Powell, 2011). Laker suggests that this difference results from the fact that the
characteristics of soft skills and the relative training requirements are different from that of
the hard skills. Georges argue that teaching soft skills in the classroom is actually education
not training. He makes a parallelism with trying to teach how to ride a bicycle while sitting
around a table.
Based on the above remarks, we may argue that, the explicit development of generic skills
needs to be embedded into each course or subject and becomes, by extension, the
responsibility of the subject specialist, albeit with the advice and support of learning
specialists/developers.
However, Resnick (1987) criticised the use of highly specific learning situations because the
learning may become bound to that setting (for example, the workplace), and not transfer to
other situations. Falk (1999) suggests that considering workplaces as sites for learning in part
avoids the problem of transfer from the classroom to the workplace. However, Billett (1998)
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