Creating a 21st Century Skills Survey Instrument for High School Students

This article describes the development of a 21st century skills instrument for high school students. The first round of development of the instrument was crafted from four rubrics created to assess communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity within project-based learning (PBL) activities. After an exploratory factor analysis, the pilot study results revealed multiple survey items loading across multiple factors requiring a revised instrument. The research team revised the instrument and added more items by using language from P21 standards documents. The revised 21st century skills instrument of 50 items was administered to 276 high school students participating in a STEM program. The final Exploratory Factor Analysis yielded a total of 30 survey items loaded across the four subscales with strong internal consistency within the constructs. This instrument can be used as a baseline and achievement measure for high school students’ 21st century skills.