interpersonal and intrapersonal skill assessment alternatives report cover

Interpersonal and intrapersonal skill assessment alternatives: Self-reports, situational judgment tests, and discrete choice experiments

Our Publications

Responding to a groundswell of researcher and practitioner interest in developing students’ interpersonal and intrapersonal skills, we evaluated three measurement approaches for creativity and global citizenship. We designed a 10-criteria evaluative framework from seminal and cutting-edge research to compare extant self-reports and situational judgment tests (SJTs) from each construct and to design two discrete choice experiments (DCEs). Our evaluation detailed opportunities, challenges, and tradeoffs presented by each approach’s design considerations, possibilities for bias, and validity-related issues. We found that researchers rely heavily upon self-report instruments to measure constructs, such as creative thinking and global citizenship. We found evidence that the self-report instruments evaluated were susceptible to some biases more than others. We found that SJTs and DCEs may mitigate some concerns of bias and validity present in self-report when measuring interpersonal and intrapersonal skills. We make recommendations for future development of these formats.

CIE ESD cover

Essential Skills and Dispositions: Developmental Frameworks for Collaboration, Communication, Creativity, and Self-Direction

Our Publications

This set of developmental frameworks was created to facilitate discussion within communities of practice and to enhance a shared understanding of the dynamic nature of four essential skills—collaboration, communication, creativity, and self-direction in learning. The frameworks define components inherent to each skill and describe performance across a beginner to emerging expert progression, informed by research on the development of expertise. Unlike discipline-specific learning progressions and rubrics, the developmental progressions reflect components essential to the skill itself and describe growth dependent on many years of active exploration, experimentation, setbacks, and reflection.

New Conceptions of College and Career Ready Report Cover

New Conceptions of College and Career Ready

Our Publications

A college and career ready student possesses the content knowledge, strategies, skills, and techniques necessary to be successful in any of a range of postsecondary setting. Success is defined as the ability to complete entry-level courses at a level of performance that is sufficient to enable students to continue to the next courses in their chosen field of study. Not every student needs exactly the same knowledge and skills to be college and career ready. A student’s college and career interests help identify the precise knowledge and skills the student needs.

Learning Strategies as Metacognitive Factors: A Critical Review

Our Publications

This paper highlights the conceptual soundness of explicitly acknowledging and developing metacognitive factors in the learning process. It also demonstrates the feasibility of measuring these skills and of the ways in which schools, districts, and states can incorporate them into practice, first on a limited, experimental basis, with the commitment to scaling them up when they demonstrate success.

mindsets and equitable education report cover page

MindSets and Equitable Education

Recommended Reading

Stanford professor and leading researcher Carol S. Dweck discusses mindsets and how beliefs about intelligence affect learning outcomes. According to her, there are two fundamental mindsets that a student can have about intelligence: it is fixed, or it is fluid and can increase with practice and training. These two mindsets strongly affect students’ perception of their intelligence as well as achievement.

Redefining College Readiness

Our Publications

In this report, EPIC’s founder, Dr. David Conley, suggests that “college readiness” has been defined primarily in terms of high school courses taken, grades received, and scores on national tests. He proposes widening the scope and redefining college readiness to include Key Cognitive Strategies, Key Content Knowledge, Academic Behaviors, and Contextual Skills.