By Henrietta Cook and Education Editor
How do you test whether students have learnt the skills that are meant to prepare them for life?
It's a challenging task and one which Victorian schools are now getting to grips with following changes to the state's curriculum.
Ben, a student at Mount Eliza Secondary College teaching Jann Bell how to listen to the radio via her iPad. Credit: Penny Stephens
From next year, schools will have to assess their students against four new non-academic "capabilities" – critical and creative thinking, personal and social abilities, and intercultural and ethical skills.
It's part of a global movement to measure skills that traditional pen and paper tests have failed to capture.
These capabilities include those covered by such 21st century buzzwords as grit, resilience and empathy.
Professor Bill Lucas, an international advisor to the Mitchell Institute at Victoria University, said the divide between real world skills and what is taught in classrooms had become "frankly ridiculous".
"We don't need all kids to know how to manipulate quadratic equations," he said.
Professor Lucas has been working with the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority to test ways of measure these capabilities in 12 schools before they are rolled out across the state.
This week he presented to the Victorian Education Department on assessing non-cognitive skills such as curiosity, creativity and problem solving.
"This is what we need kids to do to be employable but it is exactly what the assessment system is not set up to do," he said.
"The system wants a paper and pencil response and it is a solo activity done by a stressed individual, often on a hot day, in a gymnasium."
Year 7 and 8 students at Mount Eliza Secondary College have been involved in the trial, and devote one day a week to a program called Idea Lab.
So far, they have run a festival showing young people how they can give back to the community, created a student-run not-for-profit board that dishes out grants to worthy projects, and built an Indigenous garden.
They have also created "senior techies", a program which involves students solving a real-life problem – older Australians' struggle with technology.
Armed with laptops and iPads, the students have been showing seniors from the neighbourhood house, including Jann Bell, how to tune into the cricket online and listen to music.
The initiative has helped students develop their communication skills and a sense of ethical responsibility, according to the school's capabilities learning leader Arturo Tallarida.
"These are the things that business say they want to see in young people when they graduate," he said.
"We are trying to start on those skills early. We want them to be life-long learners."
Teachers at Mount Eliza Secondary College use a set of standards to measure whether students have grasped these skills, with the results included in school results.
Students also self-assess and are judged by their peers.
But some experts, including University of Pennsylvania professor Angela Duckworth – who popularised the term "grit" in education circles – have warned that there is no trustworthy way of measuring these social-emotional skills.
Teachers can misinterpret student behaviour and students who self-assess by filling out questionnaires may provide desirable but inaccurate responses.
The push to measure these non-academic skills coincides with new "Education State" targets launched by the Andrews government.
Within the next decade, it hopes that more students reach the highest levels of achievement in critical and creative thinking and a 20 per cent increase in the proportion of students who report high resilience in the next decade.
The Programme for International Student Assessment – an international test that pits 15-year-old Australian students against their overseas counterparts – is also honing in on these skills.
In 2015 it focused on collaborative problem solving and in 2018 it will assess global competence for the first time.