Challenges in Assessments of Soft Skills: Towards Unobtrusive Approaches to Measuring Student Success

Rapid technological advances, coupled with globalization, have resulted in a changing economy, requiring graduates and students to master not only technical and subject knowledge but also broad, transferable skills for workplace readiness. However, assessing these essential soft skills and competencies beyond the cognitive domain has often relied on questionnaires, surveys and other self-rated scales, which are subjective, often obtrusive in nature, subject to response biases, and lack scalability. In contrast, the pervasive use of educational technology has provided researchers with the opportunity to unobtrusively collect enormous amounts of factual learners’ data which has the potential to overcome some of the challenges with questionnaire-based approaches. These unobtrusive measures increase the possibilities of passively evaluating skill acquisition and supporting learners by personalizing learning according to their needs. This chapter outlines a multi-tiered case study and proposes a novel blended methodology, marrying measurement models and learning analytics techniques to mitigate some of these challenges and unobtrusively measure leadership skills in a workplace learning context. Using learners’ reflection assessments, several leadership-defining course objectives were quantified, and their progress was assessed over time. The implications of this evidence-based assessment approach, informed by theory, to measure and model soft skills acquisition are further discussed.