Assessment of Developmental Stages of Generic Skills: A Case Study

Abstract

Generic skills (GS) are meta-competencies necessary for acquiring knowledge from provided information in classes. This paper assumes that GS consists of a skill associated with the literacy for pulling information from the accessible contents in the classes, and a skill associated with the literacy for pushing knowledge stored in the students’ brain for obtaining useful information from the instructors. Based on the assumption, we propose a method for assessing developmental stages of GS. Observational studies were conducted in a real classroom for testing this assumption. For preparation, we defined a micro-structure of GS. Using the structure, we identified three critical parameters that should characterise the students’ performance on the micro-structure. Then, we selected elite monitors to verify whether micro-structure works in our study. The results suggested that the micro-structure of GS works well in classroom situations. We conclude that three critical parameters are good parameters for assessing developmental stages of GS.