Soft Skill Assessment in Higher Education
Abstract
Soft skills are defined as socio-emotional abilities, important for personal development, social participation, academic and work achievement, and are ideally opposite to specific technical skills. University is today called to adapt to the demands of a complex and mutable labour market, where it is important to support the graduates’ employability and to prepare future professionals who possess, in addition to technical skills, also soft skills. The University of Turin has introduced a theoretical and methodological reflection about soft skills’assessment and development in its students, through the Passport.Unito Project. According to international literature, a model of 12 soft skills was set up (Bennett et al., 1999; Heckman & Kautz, 2016): area of task (problem solving and decision making, time and space management, adoption of strategies adequate in tackling the task); area of the self (self-enhancement, emotional self-regulation, enterprise); motivational area (goal orientation, causal attribution, resilience); area of the interpersonal relationships (teamwork, communication, conflict management). The Project considers the development of a soft skills self-assessment tool (PassporTest), aimed at providing a description of the level of the different soft skills in the model. In this study are presented the validation data (exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, reliability, validity) and the results of a first survey on a large sample of students from different University degree programs (N = 1048).
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PDFDOI: https://doi.org/10.7358/ecps-2018-018-ricc
Copyright (©) 2018 Journal of Educational, Cultural and Psychological Studies (ECPS Journal) – Editorial format and Graphical layout: copyright (©) LED Edizioni Universitarie
Journal of Educational, Cultural and Psychological Studies (ECPS)
Registered by Tribunale di Milano (19/05/2010 n. 278)
Online ISSN 2037-7924 - Print ISSN 2037-7932
Research Laboratory on Didactics and Evaluation - Department of Education - "Roma Tre" University
Executive Editor: Gaetano Domenici - Associate Executive Editor & Managing Editor: Valeria Biasci
Editorial Board: Eleftheria Argyropoulou - Massimo Baldacci - Joao Barroso - Richard Bates - Christofer Bezzina - Paolo Bonaiuto - Lucia Boncori - Pietro Boscolo - Sara Bubb - Carlo Felice Casula - Jean-Émile Charlier - Lucia Chiappetta Cajola - Carmela Covato - Jean-Louis Derouet - Peter Early - Franco Frabboni - Constance Katz - James Levin - Pietro Lucisano - Roberto Maragliano - Romuald Normand - Michael Osborne - Donatella Palomba - Michele Pellerey - Clotilde Pontecorvo - Vitaly V. Rubtzov - Jaap Scheerens - Noah W. Sobe - Francesco Susi - Giuseppe Spadafora - Pat Thomson
Editorial Staff: Fabio Alivernini - Guido Benvenuto - Anna Maria Ciraci - Massimiliano Fiorucci - Luca Mallia - Massimo Margottini - Giovanni Moretti - Carla Roverselli
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