Abstract:

Society faces mutiple challenges in this millenium and education should promote skills that allow students and teachers to face them. Students will have to be prepared for jobs that have not yet been created, for technologies that have not yet been invented, to solve problems that have not yet been anticipated. As educators it will be a shared responsibility to take advantage of the opportunities and find solutions.

In this context international organizations linked to educational change are rethinking the role of current education. One initiative is the creation of frameworks to promote and develop skills for the 21st century which are defined as a set of skills necessary to interact in today's world, mainly in study and employment, where the management of technology is crucial.

In Chile, initiatives in this area are being foreshadowed and it is necessary to define a reference framework that complements this process. The objective of this paper is to propose a frame of reference of skills for the 21st century that synthesizes the diversity of referents to have an useful referent to guide educational innovation processes in our latin american context.

Based in a quantitative methodology, it was applied a descriptive-comparative analysis of frameworks formulated by international organizations that promote these skills and are linked to education.

Theoretical analysis' results show concordance in five categories: Cognitive, Social, Emotional, Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), and Specific Curricular Contents for the XXI century. They were the basis to build a questionaire called "Scale to measure the degree of importance of the XXI century skills" oriented to the educational communities. This scale was validated by content validation through the Delphi method with 7 experts. The reliability obteined was considered as excellent (Cronhbach's Alpha 0.96) through online consultation to 72 subjects.

With this background, we are able to present a referential framework maintaining the five initial key categories, and adding 38 essential skills that are defined for the 21st century.

Keywords:

Referential Framework, 21st Century Skills, Chilean Education, Innovation.