From Soft Skills to Hard Data: Measuring Youth Program Outcomes
Posted by on March 10, 2014
From Soft Skills to Hard Data:
MEASURING YOUTH PROGRAM OUTCOMES
Two years after its publication, the basic trends that motivated the development of this guide continue. Practitioner access to user-friendly, rigorous measurement tools remains limited. Youth-serving programs and systems experience increasing pressure to improve policy-relevant outcomes. And across education, youth development and workforce circles, emphasis on socio-emotional or 21st century skills such as communication, collaboration, critical thinking and initiative continues to grow.
The number of recent policy reports, blogs, newspaper articles, white papers, academic articles and even popular press books that address the importance of these skills is astounding. Two publications that have influenced our thinking quite a bit include Education for Life and Work from the National Research Council and Teaching Adolescents to Become Learners from the Chicago Consortium on School Research. Though measure development doesn’t seem to be keeping pace with the commentary (measuring such skills turns out to be much harder than convincing people of their importance), some new measures have emerged and others are being improved with use.
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