Abstract:

The assessment of 21st-century skills has become one of the critical objectives in modern education. However, such complex skills are hard to assess with traditional assessment tools. Another option is to use scenario-based tasks with a digital environment which provides high variability in test-taker-task interactions. Furthermore, scenario-based tasks can keep students’ motivation and engagement through task context representing a fascinating story in a fantasy world or a real-life situation in school. This study aims to investigate the relationship between students` attitudes towards task context and achievement based on the assessment of 21st-century skills in primary school.

The sample consists of more than three hundred 4-grade Russian students who participated in the study in the autumn 2021. The participants were presented with three pairs of scenario tasks (three testing sessions) aimed at measuring creativity, critical thinking and communication and cooperation skills. Each pair include two alternative forms of the same task set in different contexts. Within a pair of scenarios, tasks were presented randomly to control the order effect. After each testing session, participants were asked to fill a questionnaire and compare two tasks by their difficulty and attraction. Students may give preference to one of the tasks or rank them both equally.

To achieve the aim of the study, we analyze test data with Item Response Theory (IRT) framework to get students` scores on creativity, critical thinking and communication, and cooperation skills. For the next step, the statistical relationship between students` achievement and attitudes towards task context based on the questionnaire were investigated separately for each pair of scenarios. The study discusses the effect of context and students` preferences on achievement in scenario tasks and how these effects depend on the measurable skill and task features in the digital environment.

Keywords:

Task context, students’ attitudes, 21st-century skills, scenario-based tasks.