Assessment & Teaching of 21st Century Skills
Status Report as of January 2010
Cisco Systems Inc., Intel Corporation and Microsoft Corp. unveiled plans in January 2008 to sponsor a project to research and develop new approaches, methods and technologies for measuring the success of 21st-century teaching and learning in classrooms around the world. The Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills (ATC21S™) project is focused on defining those skills and developing ways to measure them.
Five "founder countries" have agreed to take part in the research and will deploy ATC21S pilot projects in schools as early as February. The five are Australia, Finland, Portugal, Singapore and the United Kingdom. The ATC21S project is operating through five working groups, each of which will review the current state of development and propose research and development activities to address current deficiencies. Together, the working groups comprise individuals from more than 60 research institutions.
Each working group produced an end-of-year status report. Those papers are available on the project web site, http://www.atc21s.org.