What: A two-day intensive technical workshop focused on life skills assessment; combining presentations from measurement experts and organizations with multi-country assessment experience with group discussion and debate. The workshop is exclusively focused on the technical aspects of developing life skills measurement.
What it is not: An effort to promote a particular life skills programmatic approach, curriculum or assessment instrument.
Who: Individuals actively working on developing or refining life skills assessments and are interested in applying more rigorous psychometric testing to their assessment development process and developing assessments with evidence-based properties.
Where: Brookings Institution, 1775 Massachusetts Ave NW, Washington, DC 20036
When: January 21 &22, 2020
Please complete the registration survey if you are interested in attending.
Background:
Building life skills has become a key objective of many development programs and country policy frameworks. A growing body of research points to life skills as essential for children and youth to become critical thinkers, engaged citizens and successful in life. Yet, evidence about what life skills are most critical for successful life outcomes is still scarce. And evidence about effective strategies for building life skills at scale is even scarcer.
Alongside the increased policy and programmatic interest in life skills education, there has been a corresponding interest in establishing practical assessment instruments and processes to measure the impact of interventions and help us learn how to scale effective life skills programs. An array of actors including researchers, donors and implementing organizations have sought to address this need, each bringing their own set of needs, constraints, assumptions, and methodological expertise to bear on the challenge. The scale and diversity of these efforts presents an opportunity for collaboration and learning across actors, building on each other’s successes and challenges and moving our sector toward higher-quality life skills assessment.
It is in this spirit that Room to Read and the Center for Universal Education at Brookings (CUE) is convening a group of experts for a two-day technical workshop on life skills measurement. Room to Read’s own work in this space dates to 2016, with the development and initial pilot of our life skills assessment. Since this time, Room to Read has implemented an intensive, multi-country process to develop and refine a comprehensive life skills assessment to measure the effectiveness of our Girls’ Education Program. We have endeavored to address challenges related to instrument reliability and validity, different types of biases as well as contextualization and administration challenges - and still have much work to do on all these fronts. The “Optimizing Assessment for All” initiative at CUE dating from 2017, focuses on strengthening education systems’ capacity to integrate 21st century skills into their teaching and learning, using assessment as one important means of building that capacity. The initiative has gathered baseline data on national life skills assessment systems across a range of countries and is piloting classroom-based administration of life skills assessments in multiple contexts.
In the workshop, we will bring together a set of experts with deep knowledge in psychometrics and life skills measurement as well as representatives from several organizations that have developed their own assessments which have been administered in multiple countries. Group discussion and expert feedback on strategies for improving reliability and validity, mitigating biases and optimizing contextualization will complement the expert and organizational presentations.
