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Global Trends in Education
—What Are 21st Century Skills?

MARCH 29, 2022
By Genki Nakamura
Educational Solution Section
CASIO COMPUTER CO., LTD.

History of ATC21s

In 2009, the ATC21s (Assessment & Teaching of 21st Century Skills Project), an international organization comprised of companies, educational institutions and other organizations from the United States and other countries, was launched. Top-level educational researchers from around the world defined 10 skills across four areas as 21st-Century Skills, and compiled a white paper in 2012.

21st Century Skills as Defined by ATC21s

Since the publication of the white paper, 21st Century Skills have been referenced and introduced in educational reforms in various countries.

But why were 21st century skills devised in the first place?　To know this, we first need to know the motivation behind educational reforms in developed countries. Michiko Watanabe, a Japanese statistician, offers the following overview.

"With the advent of a full-fledged knowledge-based society and the progress of globalization, the development of human resources with the creative capability to develop new ideas, knowledge, business plans, information and technology is recognized as an important issue closely related to the economic development of developed countries. Since the 1990s, education reforms have been underway in countries that are looking ahead to what the workforce of the 21st century will be like."

In other words, the demand for innovative human resources has been increasing as the times change, and thus, the need for education in developed countries to provide schooling that differs from the conventional way of doing things forms the basis of ATC21s' recommendations for 21st Century Skills.

Why are 21st Century Skills Important to Countries?

21st Century Skills are being referenced in educational reforms in developed nations because they are recommended based on scientific evidence.

Educational science has revealed that promoting soft skill-type education, where students are provided with the experiences required to proactively and collaboratively develop knowledge, rather than limiting education to hard skill-type education that involves teachers imparting their knowledge to students, allows the students to gain a more substantive understanding which will lead them to continually engage in learning. The 21st Century Skills proposed by ATC21s refer to these soft skills, and it is believed that transitioning from "teaching" to "mutual learning" will help students acquire soft skills.

Up to now, society has placed significant emphasis on teaching hard skills as knowledge to solve specific problems. The primary theme of education design was to determine learning goals and measure proficiency through tests and other methods, while exploring how to get many first-time learners to reach those goals most efficiently.

Although hard skills are a prerequisite for various tasks and remain quite necessary, many experts have pointed out that the development of IT technology in particular has so intensified the degree of change in society that there will be more and more instances where people will not able to adapt to such changes after learning hard skills alone.

For example, educational scholar Tomoaki Matsuo made the following observations about changes to the market:

"New technologies have enabled a more flexible production style that can accommodate the diverse needs and the ever-changing interests of consumers. The resulting individualized and fragmented markets replaced the large-scale production and consumption of the past, and prompted the transition to a diversified and differentiated economic model in response to shifting consumer needs and preferences."

As can be observed with the emergence of various innovations, such as big data in the form of massive quantities of text data and customer purchase history data on the Internet, and AI that captures the individual needs of consumers, the appearance of new IT technology has heightened the need for human resources that have acquired soft skills, which will allow them to develop new knowledge of their own.

Japanese educational science researcher Hiroyuki Masukawa has made some comparisons of people who have acquired hard skills and those who have acquired soft skills:

"The standard type of proficient individual is someone who can always perform certain types of activities without mistakes. This type of person practices diligently to achieve this level of proficiently, is able to do many things very quickly, and is a professional that can do things others cannot. In contrast, an adaptively proficient individual is someone who can reassemble their knowledge and create new ways to do things when confronted with a new situation.

Although knowledge is a key difference between them, the standard type of proficient individual is very familiar with what it is that should be done in a given situation. But what these individuals have is just a "list" of knowledge. Adaptively proficient individuals, on the other hand, are characterized by a core concept: they possess a mesh-like, conceptual knowledge that they can reassemble in order to adapt to a situation. So, since they need to train constantly in order to achieve this state and think and act flexibly in new situations, they continually foster the attitude of striving for constant improvement, and make new friends."

In order to develop soft skills, it is important for students to personally experience doubt and think for themselves during the learning process. When learners voice their questions to each other, consider them together, and try to find answers together, these experiences grant them even more substantial understanding of their own knowledge, and guides them toward more continuous learning.

A Concrete Image of Classes that Address 21st Century Skills

Many ICT companies have participated in ATC21s, and developed nations have established methodologies that will foster the development of soft skills by tying solutions to problems faced by young students to statistics early on in their school education, and encouraging debate and deliberation.

For example, the following statistics classes might be considered an example of such education.

Question Text
In March 2022, a website asked the question, "What were the best movies of the past 30 years?" as part of a survey, and the results were reported on the news. Movie A was ranked No. 1 with 31,612 votes. Next was Movie B with 29,847 votes, and Movie C with 26,532 votes.
*The specific titles of the movies are not important, and let's say that Movie A was released in 2021, Movie B in 2011, and Movie C in 2010.

Question 1
Have you seen these three movies?
Let's hold a vote to see how many of your classmates have seen them.

Question 2
What kind of people provided answers to the survey on this website?
How did they complete this survey?
Let's try and guess.

Question 3
If people more than 10 years older than yourselves were to vote, do you think Movie A would be chosen as No. 1?
Please justify your opinion.

Based on the poll results to Question 1, we can get students to think about why the vote total for Movie B, a movie released 10 years ago, is so close to the total for Movie A. The results of the data will foster a variety of different questions in the students: How old were the people who answered the web survey? When were the movies released? Were there reruns of the movies on TV or the Internet?

Furthermore, through Question 2 and Question 3, we can promote debate between the students regarding whether the surveys allowed for free-form responses or had responders select from a list of choices, whether the responders might be a biased sample compared to the population, and what can be done in order to extract a non-biased sample.

In addition, the following questions can also help students to think more proactively and collaboratively:

(1) Have you ever seen any articles or advertisements that publish data that could be misrepresented as being representative of the population?
(2) What could lead someone to show people misleading data like this?
(3) What can we do to ensure a rational survey?
…

Instead of just having students simply be on the receiving end of knowledge that they might feel has nothing to do with them, having students share familiar and personally interesting questions, put their thoughts into words to try and answer those questions with their fellow students, and create new questions in the process, will help them to realize how important it is to learn things that they themselves do not know. Building knowledge in this way will help students develop their own 21st Century Skills.