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

1-5 lesson plans, relative to the development of the particular soft skill. Each lesson
plan is designed for duration of 1 school hour. It contains the timeline of the
activities and teaching recommendation.
Student pack, with the activities contained in all lesson plans.
Teacher pack, with indicative answers in the activities of the student pack.
Apart from the Learning Bytes, there is an additional introduction to the programme, setting
goals and aims and proposing an assessment methodology. It contains separate material for
students and teachers.
Also, included is a list of additional resources, which may be useful during the courses.
The activities proposed address a wide range of educational needs, from clarification of
terms used to case studies and initiatives for discussion. They come in several forms,
including linguistic puzzles, multiple choice questions, case studies, free form questions etc.
The main goal of all activities included, irrelevant to their form, is to serve as a basis for
discussions, to give examples of good social practice and to promote self-reflection.
MASS Project
As we extensively refer to another paper of this volume (see “Introduction to MASS
project”), the MASS project’s main intent is the transfer of SkillZone experience to a number
of partners from other countries. The partners translated the learning materials and applied
them in their own institutions.
In this paper we will present the target groups and teaching efforts of the partners. The
assessment methodology and results are presented in another paper in this volume (see p.
139). Even though we have already presented the SkillZone’s target group characteristics, in
what follows, for completeness we will also include the same data with the ones from the
rest of the partners.
Data Collection Methodology
In order to ensure some degree of uniformity and comparison among the results reported
from different partners, the data collection has been done through a standardized document
structure, having the form of a template, presented at Figure 1. The partners were asked to
input actual data under the headings provided. They were allowed to modify the template’s
structure, if it didn’t fit in their approach and framework of operation. However the
modifications made were minimal.
The format of the template reflects a compromise between the need for the partners to act
independently and the need for a uniform report, which make comparisons feasible. As each
partner has different context of soft skills training, it is expected that different teaching
methodologies and assessment practices are required. Concerning the assessment
frameworks, they should be compatible with each partner’s operational practices and give
information of interest to them, which may be different for each partner. On the other hand,
some least common denominators should exist, so as to be able to draw some conclusions.
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