INDUSTRY & RESEARCH
campusreview.com.au
Future focus
UniMelb researchers investigate
how we can ‘future proof’
students for the 21st century.
Sandra Milligan interviewed by Wade Zaglas
Professor Sandra Milligan from
the University of Melbourne and
her fellow experts were inspired
to write the report 'Future Proofing
Students: What they need to know and
how educators can assess and credential
them' after noticing a disconnect
between "what teachers want students
to learn and how they are credentialed"
or assessed.
The authors of the report also found
that employers often knew little of what a
student could really do based on a report
card. Students, too, often complained that
some credentials didn't reflect who they
really were.
Campus Review spoke to Milligan about
this issue as well as the skills all students
will require now and into the future.
Depending on the context, these skills
are called different things: soft skills, 21st
century skills, general capabilities and
graduate qualities.
They include teamwork and
collaboration, communication in a range
of forms, critical and creative thinking, and
problem solving, to name a few. Milligan
refers to them as "learning skills" as they are
essential to the learning process.
Milligan also discussed the idea of a
learner profile, which allows educators
to assess these credentials – or general
capabilities in school language – in a more
detailed way than a report. She's hoping
this new way of assessing credentials
gains traction but admits there are big
challenges ahead.
CR: Why did you and your co-authors decide
this was a topic that demanded attention?
SM: We work in the Assessment Research
Centre at the University of Melbourne, so
that means we get a lot of people coming
to us when they've got issues to do with
their assessment or their credentials. And
what we've noticed over the last few years
is that people are telling us there's a real
mismatch between what they want to teach
students and what they want students
to learn, and what's assessed and what's
credentialed.
In other words, the credentials don't
match the aspiration to learning. And
we found this to be true right across the
education sector.
For instance, in schools, the Australian
curriculum really says you need to
learn a lot of things as well as subject
content, like chemistry and French and
so forth, yet our ATAR and our VCE and
HSC credentials usually focus on what
can be tested in examinations, quizzes
or tests. And it's not really reflecting the
whole range of what students know
and can do.
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