Does Higher Education Teach Students to Think Critically?
There is a discernible and growing gap between the qualifications that a university degree certifies and the actual generic, 21st-century skills with which students graduate from higher education. By generic skills, it is meant literacy and critical thinking skills encompassing problem solving, analytic reasoning and communications competency. As automation takes over non- and lower-cognitive tasks in today’s workplace, these generic skills are especially valued but a tertiary degree is a poor indicator of skills level. In the United States, the Council for Aid for Education developed an assessment of generic skills called the CLA+ and carried out testing in six countries between 2016 and 2021. This book provides the data and analysis of this “CLA+ International Initiative”.
Assessing the generic skills of undergraduate students in Finland
This chapter describes a project on the assessment of Finnish undergraduate students’ generic skills. It gives a brief overview of the Finnish higher education system and the policy context that has paved the way for the assessment of generic skills. It describes the aims of the project, and illustrates how it was conducted in Finland. The chapter also presents the key findings on the mastery of generic skills, and the main factors explaining the level of generic skills. Finally, it presents policy recommendations aimed at enhancing the teaching and learning of generic skills within undergraduate studies, and outlines the lessons learnt from the assessment of generic skills in Finland.
- Click to access:
-
Click to download PDF - 986.00KBPDF