O`Connor, A. Digital Badges in ITTE

Editor's Notes

• #3: Grading Soft Skills is a 3-year longitudinal research project financially supported by the EU and developed in association with the LLP which is the flagship European funding plan in the field of education and training. There are 8 partners in the project consortium from Serbia, Sweden, Ireland, and Croatia. Each of the partner institutions have developed their own specific application cases for the development and assessment of soft skills. The context of these application cases range from lower second level schooling to higher education at University level.
• #4: Soft skills represent a broad set of personal traits that are considered highly important for success in modern workplace settings as they help people to deal effectively with the challenges of their professional and everyday life. So what were talking about are our ways of working, ways of thinking, and ways of working and thinking with others. Examples of soft skills include collaboration, knowledge construction, self-regulation and real-world problem-solving. These social-emotional skills can be categorised by two distinct perspectives: intra-personal skills that support the holistic development of the individual inter-personal skills that enable the individual to participate effectively within society
• #5: Soft skills have been defined in a number of different ways but a common trait of all those definitions is that they explicitly distinguish soft skills from hard or technical skills. However, the difficulty lies in separating the evidence of hard skills which tend to be more declarative in nature from the authentic evidence of soft skills. In support of these considerations, the focus of this research is on devising a method for grading soft skills to ensure a valid interpretation of student capability. This requires a multi-modal approach that allows students to capture authentic evidence of their learning and to determine what is presented as evidence relative to the learning task, and to track the meta-data produced by students during the learning task with reference to specific levels of attainment.
• #6: With the use of digital badges UL`s application case focuses on representing soft skills of undergraduate students in Initial Technology Teacher Education in a measurable way so that these skills can become the subject of formal grading and recognition. This research has taken place in the: Given the context of this research is that of an ITTE degree course, soft skills of participation and contribution are a fundamental set of competencies for students to develop as the capacity to participate effectively when working with others and contribute purposefully when thinking with others is critical to both vocational and personal success. The approach taken integrated Edmodo as it could be supported on both stationary computers and mobile technologies, and it was understood that the automatically recorded and machine-readable timeline of student activity would offer a compelling source of data and real-time account of the soft skills being developed.
• #7: Edmodo recorded a student response of 2928 posts and replies occurring over the 12 week period with an average of 47 posts and replies per student. The findings indicate that female participants recorded a higher average response rate than their male counterparts but reveals a higher standard deviation. The interpretation is that male and female participants responded equally. At the end of the 12 week period students were asked to generate a concluding post in which they expressed their overall thoughts and feelings in relation to Edmodo. Analysis of these posts revealed the following advantages:
• #8: In an attempt to achieve a standards-referenced continuum of soft skill acquisition ranging from low proficiency to high proficiency that describes student’s capability in terms of the tasks performed or competencies displayed, this study designed and accredited bronze, silver and gold badges for participation and contribution.
• #11: The interpretation of the meta-data using this method allowed each badge to be mapped to different sets of criteria, creating stages along an increasing continuum of soft skill achievement indicated by student’s evidence of learning.
• #12: It is the recommendation of this research that any decision reached in relation to the grading of soft skills should be an aggregation of the interpretation of all stakeholders in the educational transaction. The significance of a triangulated approach that respects the students own personal reflection, the peers contextual evaluation, and the teachers professional critique is grounded in ecological validity.
• #13: With the use of ICT tools and services such as Edmodo & Digital Badges in ITTE begin to: Separate the evidence of hard skills from soft skills to ensure a valid interpretation of student capability. Present a multi-modal approach that allows students to capture authentic evidence of their learning. Track the meta-data produced by students during the learning task with reference to specific levels of attainment. Finally, the design of the Assessment Architecture suggests that: Empowering stakeholders as critical partners in grading soft skills supports the ecological validity of the approach Reliability of the approach is strengthened by the triangulation of the stakeholders judgements. The capacity to weight the judgement of individual stakeholders relative to any given context or situation. For example in certain circumstances the peer evaluation may outweigh that of the teacher, or the self-evaluation may be a more reliable interpretation than the peers depending on the nature of the educational transaction.