Metrics for Students’ Soft Skills

This article presents a systematic approach to defining, applying, evaluating, refining, and revising metrics for students' soft skills-their abilities like critical thinking, problem solving, leadership and responsibility, communication, and collaboration. The importance of these skills in educational and work settings is growing rapidly. While such skills are easy to notice, they are hard to measure. Metrics do exist, but vary from one case to another, and are often rather implicit and vague. Contrary to that, this article proposes the use of precisely specified, measurable, low-inference indicators (metrics) to assess soft skills. The article also introduces an open set of principles that can be used to guide the specification of concrete, evidence-based metrics for different soft skills. Two case studies are used to illustrate the approach. These case studies are part of a larger research effort that has developed an open set of metrics for different soft skills; some of them are discussed in the article extensively. Generalizing the metrics used in specific educational contexts is also discussed.