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This volume offers new perspectives on 21st century teaching skills, focusing especially on assessment. The text offers strategies to improve individual and group development, and draws on international comparisons to identify policy frameworks.

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Rapid-and seemingly accelerating-changes in the economies of developed nations are having a proportional effect on the skill sets required of workers in many new jobs. Work environments are often technology-heavy, while problems are frequently ill-defined and tackled by multidisciplinary teams. This book contains insights based on research conducted as part of a major international project supported by Cisco, Intel and Microsoft. It faces these new working environments head-on, delineating new ways of thinking about ´21 st -century´ skills and including operational definitions of those skills. The authors focus too on fresh approaches to educational assessment, and present methodological and technological solutions to the barriers that hinder ICT-based assessments of these skills, whether in large-scale surveys or classrooms. Equally committed to defining its terms and providing practical solutions, and including international perspectives and comparative evaluations of assessment methodology and policy, this volume tackles an issue at the top of most educationalists´ agendas.

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List of tables.- List of figures.- Abstracts.- Foreword.- Chapter 1: Overview.- Chapter 2: Defining 21 st century skills.- Chapter 3: Perspectives on Methodological Issues.- Chapter 4: Technological Issues for Computer-Based Assessment.- Chapter 5: New assessments and environments for knowledge building.- Chapter 6: Policy frameworks for new assessments.- Conclusion.- References.

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From the reviews:

"This book about assessment reform is the collective output of a year of effort by five international working groups under the umbrella organization Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills (ATC21S) at the University of Melbourne. ... Those who will obtain the greatest value from the book are policy makers, assessment developers, and scholars investigating 21st century skills and ways to measure them. ... of particular value to people conducting research on revamping curriculum and assessment practices to meet the needs of 21st century society." (G. Abramson, ACM Computing Reviews, June, 2012)

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