Assessment of what? From measuring memorized content knowledge towards a multilevel assessment cf competencies – the journey’s starting point

Abstract

The present paper draws on recent calls from the industry to support students’ development of “Future Skills” (Ehlers, forthcoming), thereby highlighting the corresponding need for new assessment methods that can be applied in both contexts: organizations as well as higher education institutions (HEIs). To date, identification of such skill sets makes up the lion’s share of publications, dedicating little attention to the important question of how to assess them. The present paper seeks to provide an attempt to fill this gap thereby linking Hackman’ s conceptualization of effective outcomes (organizational perspective) and Bloom’ s Learning Taxonomy (educational perspective). The key point the present paper aims to make is that to assess future skills, pure performance evaluation is not sufficient; instead, viability and learning are introduced as two additional types of outcomes suited for the future skills context.