Teaching & Assessing 21st Century Skills: A Focus on Intercultural Understanding
Principles for Assessing These Skills
In today’s globalized world, intercultural understanding is a skill that fosters respectful and productive interactions among diverse populations. In this blog, I’ll share highlights of our recent paper on intercultural understanding, which defines it and outlines key issues for schools as they explore teaching and assessing it.
Defining Intercultural Understanding
The following working definition is based on my synthesis of 30 research-based definitions.
Intercultural understanding consists of the knowledge and appreciation of cultural similarities and differences, and the skill of reflecting on one’s own culture in relation to others.
Intercultural knowledge includes an individual’s awareness and understanding of the dynamic positions, practices, and power relationships among cultures. Intercultural appreciation includes affective qualities such as empathy, respect, and open-mindedness, which enable an individual to recognize and value the diverse perspectives of individuals and groups from various cultures. Reflection includes skills for critically evaluating one’s own assumptions, biases, and experiences as they relate to other cultures.
Notably, intercultural understanding is a complex concept that incorporates several sub-skills, many of which are important 21st century skills on their own (e.g., cultural self-awareness, open-mindedness, adaptability).
Developing Intercultural Understanding
Models of intercultural understanding posit that attitudes such as flexibility, adaptability, and empathy for other cultures are prerequisites for developing intercultural understanding. As these attitudes develop, a student is then ready to apply intercultural knowledge and skills for effective and appropriate intercultural interactions.
Government agencies and education organizations have created developmental continua for intercultural understanding that span K-12. These continua articulate the knowledge and skills a student demonstrates in a particular grade span when they have mastered key dimensions of intercultural understanding.
Unfortunately, there is limited research evidence to support the validity of these developmental continua for supporting instructional decisions. Moreover, the underlying learning models informing these continua tend to be broad and simplistic, defining stages without connecting those stages and underlying skills to specific grade levels or grade bands.
Teaching Intercultural Understanding
Recent research, though still relatively sparse, suggests that a few specific instructional approaches may have the potential to improve students’ intercultural understanding, including: (a) service learning activities involving people from other cultures or diverse backgrounds (even within one’s own community), (b) study-abroad programs, (c) foreign language learning, and (d) using information and communication technology tools such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams to facilitate international exchanges.
These programs share at least one thing in common: they provide opportunities for students to more deeply engage with people from different cultural and demographic backgrounds. As Brené Brown said in her book, Braving the Wilderness, “People are hard to hate up close.” When we engage with those who are different from us, it invites us to question implicit biases that we may hold about another person or group of people.
Research also highlights the potential roles of two other sets of dynamics in students’ development of intercultural understanding: teacher and student motivation and teachers’ existing levels of intercultural competence. The full paper provides a more detailed description of school-, teacher- and student-level factors associated with students’ development of intercultural understanding.
Despite an emerging research base, studies of intercultural understanding are often based on very small studies and rely on students’ self-reports or qualitative descriptions of learning. More research is needed to establish for whom and under what conditions intercultural “interventions”—programs, instructional practices, use of communication tools—significantly improve intercultural understanding.
For example, studies of service learning suggest that certain interventions may improve aspects of intercultural understanding such as open-mindedness, empathy, and cultural self-awareness when students engage with diverse subcultures within their communities. In a rural area, this might mean serving people with different political affiliations or socio-economic backgrounds. Do improved intercultural outcomes from these experiences transfer to other intercultural experiences in which students work with students from other countries?
Principles for Assessing Intercultural Understanding
Assessing students fairly for intercultural understanding is challenging because of its complexity, particularly when research on teaching and assessing intercultural understanding has not established best practices. Five principles are worth bearing in mind:
1. Develop a clear and shared definition of intercultural understanding. A variety of terms, definitions and developmental models regarding intercultural understanding guide assessment development and use. As a result, assessments of intercultural understanding vary across classrooms and schools in the knowledge, skills, and abilities they target. A clear and shared definition informs developmental milestones and instructional strategies that coherently build the essential skills needed to develop intercultural competence across the grade span.
2. Ensure assessments align with curriculum goals and learning outcomes. Course or grade-specific assessments should accurately measure knowledge, skills, and attitudes that were represented in course/grade-level activities and explicitly identified in grade-appropriate developmental continua or learning standards. For example, if the goal of a course is to develop students’ knowledge of a specific culture and cultural norms, then an assessment should incorporate items that elicit evidence of that knowledge. Similarly, if the goal is to improve empathy and openness to unfamiliar cultural practices, then assessment activities should include items or tasks that elicit sufficient evidence of these attitudes.
3. Be clear about the claims the assessment(s) is intended to support. This principle closely relates to principle #2. Assessments of intercultural understanding can be culture-specific or culture-general. For example, assessing intercultural understanding with items or performance tasks that refer to a specific culture in a foreign language course may be feasible only in this specific course.
In other courses/subjects, it may be preferable to assess culture-general knowledge that is useful in interpreting, coping with, and adapting to a variety of cross-cultural interactions. In this alternative case, the purpose of the assessment would shift from (a) assessing an individual’s knowledge about the norms and practices of a particular culture to (b) a more culture-general assessment of the individual’s understanding that a new situation may be influenced by cultural differences.
4. Use multiple measures. Standardized measures of intercultural understanding are almost exclusively self-reported measures. Although important and useful, self-reported measures and self-reflections cannot capture, with fidelity, the construct’s range of knowledge, skills, and attitudes.
This is particularly true for skills like intercultural understanding that include multiple subskills that are best measured via direct observation or performance tasks. Performance tasks, direct observations of interactions (simulated or authentic), and self-reported assessments are needed to comprehensively assess intercultural understanding.
5. Prioritize formative strategies to develop intercultural understanding. Developing intercultural understanding takes time, and improvements often are small and incremental. Moreover, repeated exposure and frequent feedback is necessary for significant growth in intercultural understanding. Formative assessment offers timely feedback, which allows students to reflect, identify areas for improvement, and refine their approaches.
Educators can leverage evidence from peer feedback, self-assessment, observations, and structured self-reflection to support the skills and attitudes that intercultural understanding requires. By investing in formative assessment practices, educators foster an environment in which students can develop their intercultural understanding through ongoing and targeted practice and reflection.
Fostering intercultural understanding is essential for preparing students to thrive in an increasingly interconnected world. Schools can support this development by using evidence-based instructional strategies and adopting these sound and time-tested assessment principles.
Our research on analytical thinking was supported by the International Baccalaureate (IB) Programme. The author would like to acknowledge the thought partnership of colleagues who contributed to this work, including Jen Merriman, Sarah Manlove, and Magda Balica from IB, and Carla Evans at the Center for Assessment. Any errors or omissions are my own.