The Contextualisation of 21st Century Skills

Front matter

The Enabling Power of Assessment 11

Esther Care Mauro Giacomazzi John Kabutha Mugo Editors

The Contextualisation of 21st Century Skills

Foreword

Our efforts to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 4, “Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all”, bring to mind Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland “Jf you don’t know where you want to go, then it doesn't matter which path you take”.

The education systems in Africa have identified the need for twenty-first century skills, embarked into new curricula such as Kenya’s Competency Based Curriculum, and are introducing new teaching and learning methods such as inquiry-based learning. However, like Alice in Wonderland, our sense of where we want to go with these changes is vague and undefined. On the one hand, there is a lack of unanimity on what success looks like, and on the other hand, we do not yet have effective instruments for measuring progress and outcomes.

This volume engages primarily with the second of these issues. It describes an endeavour to identify where we are, relative to where we want to go. Reflecting priorities in East Africa, insights are provided into how cultural perspectives about twenty-first century skills can act as aids to their measurement, in the face of continuing global differences in the understanding of the nature and identity of these competencies. The volume describes the Assessment of Life Skills and Values (ALIVE) initiative in East Africa which has engaged in a research-based endeavour to develop a contextualised set of tools to measure life skills and values through household-based assessment.

ALIVE seeks to generate evidence on life skills and values in the East African context, develop and provide an open-source contextualised measurement tool, use the evidence to inform policy and drive public conversations, and use the tool development process as a pathway towards building and nurturing a community of practice on learning assessments. This volume describes the achievement of these goals, drawing on the expertise and experience of the ALiVE team across Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda.

The volume addresses the problem of how to measure valued skills that underpin both education and daily life in such a way that practical information about youth performance is provided. The goal is to elicit data that will guide the emerging ‘life skills’ curricula in countries in East Africa. In order to trace the method and process vi Foreword for solving the problem, the volume follows two themes. One theme concerns the prominence of twenty-first century skills in education over recent years, how this has taken form in East Africa through a collaborative learning approach, and how this can inform policy through articulating the need for and uses of household-based assessment of life skills in advocating for change in socio-economic and education policy. The other theme explores the issue of ‘global’ versus local understandings and definitions of twenty-first century skills through the lens of specific competencies — such as collaboration, self-awareness and respect, and problem solving — and then builds on this through reporting on the development of practical tools which reflect the local perspectives. This theme engages with the technical challenges of assessment of the competencies, demonstrating how the local conceptualisations lead to use of grounded daily life scenarios upon which to develop assessment items.

This is a pathbreaking work in at least four ways.

First, it recognises that the transition to twenty-first century skills requires integration into existing curricula of more complex cognitive and affective competencies, such as critical thinking, innovation, collaboration, problem solving, self-awareness, and communication. While there is broad agreement and understanding of how to measure skills such as numeracy and literacy, there is lack of clarity on the assessment and pedagogical practices that enhance some twenty-first century skills, and in particular affective skills. As a result, professional development programs for teachers do not provide guidance on how to nurture and assess competence in these character-based skills. This assessment provides an important model for assessing these skills, which can contribute to pedagogical insights.

Second, the current tools used to measure twenty-first century skills are based on Western cultures and contexts and are sometimes not relevant to African cultural contexts. The ethnographic approach taken by ALIVE provides important insights into how collaboration, problem solving, and self-awareness skills are defined in sub-Saharan Africa, how they can be taught, and how they can be assessed in class and outside it. For example, the ALIVE contextualisation study showed that collaboration is driven more by the need to stick together than by the goal to be achieved, and it reveals a fundamental difference in the understanding of the concept of collaboration which is not reflected in international assessments.

Three, by using household-based learning assessments, ALIVE prioritises the important contribution that learning and skill development makes both in school and outside it. It recognises that assessments need to capture a wide range of learners and attend to the learning needs of diverse populations. The information presented in this volume should trigger further study to identify key differences in skills and competencies between in-school and out-of-school youth to enable suitable teaching and training approaches.

Four, ALiVE provides an important pathway towards nurturing a regional community of practice on learning assessments and to generating the much needed knowledge on how to inculcate and measure life skills in the region. The psychometric value and rigour of the assessment tool, and assessed proficiencies of over 45,000 adolescents and the learning achieved by those who participated,

Foreword vii demonstrates how collaborative local action can achieve unique and profound insights that cannot be generated by external researchers.

This volume has taken the first step in that classical journey of a thousand miles that starts with the first step. It has provided an important framework for educators to contextualise the meaning and implications of skills such as collaboration and self-awareness. It should stimulate a continuing journey towards developing tools that are psychometrically rigorous, pedagogically useful, and context and culturally relevant.

June 8, 2023 Ruth Kagia

Ruth Kagia served as a Senior Adviser to the President of Kenya, as well as Head of the Presidential Policy and Strategy Unit between 2014 and 2022. Prior to this and from 1990 onward, Ruth served at the World Bank, including as World Bank Global Director for Education. In this capacity she led the establishment of the Global Partnership for Education (at that time known as the Fast-Track Initiative), currently the largest global fund dedicated to transforming education in lower-income countries. In 2008-2012, she served as World Bank Country Director for Southern Africa. Before joining the World Bank, Mrs. Kagia worked with the Kenya Government in teaching, education management, and research. She holds degrees from the University of Nairobi in Kenya, Harvard Graduate School of Education in the USA, and the Commonwealth University, UK.

Preface

This is no ordinary book. It is a mosaic of the lives of 20 East African authors, education and life skills enthusiasts and a few friends converging along the path of self-empowerment. It is the quest of East Africans to tell their own story, a story of learning through doing to not only develop and use contextualised assessments of life skills and values, but also figure out what it all means and why it matters.

We are led by the vision of a generation of learners who have acquired the needed competencies to navigate the complexities of twenty-first century learning, living, and working. The Assessment of Life Skills and Values in East Africa (ALIVE) is a journey of hope. When we started in 2020, there were only a handful of assessments of these competencies in Africa. Even then, most of the assessment tools used were standardized questionnaires, developed with a Western lens and difficult to apply to our context. Most were self- and peer-rating scales and were inaccessible at local level as none were open-sourced. We hardly found anyone in East Africa with a reasonable level of expertise to develop these assessments. In the face of these obstacles, we decided to act. We started ALIVE as a collective impact and learning initiative targeting three outcomes — learn and develop a contextualised assessment tool to conduct a large-scale assessment, use evidence for public awareness and policy awareness, and establish a community of learning that raises the voices of East Africans about these competences.

This dream started coming to fruition with the founding of the Regional Education Learning Initiative (RELD in 2017, a platform designed and dedicated to ensuring equitable access to quality education for East African children. A group of 20 civil society organizations from Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda signed into a thematic group bearing the name Values and Life Skills (VaLi). Our initial meetings focused on tracing and learning from existing assessments and interventions globally. A meeting held in June 2018 in Dar es Salaam gave strong impetus to our burgeoning movement. Facilitated by experts who included Esther Care and Helyn Kim from the Brookings Institution, Ann Herschkowitz from the Education Development Centre, and Carina Omoeva from FHI 360, this meeting yielded our clarity on the three learning questions that have driven VaLi’s learning agenda ever since. We could finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. First is the clarification of what x Preface these competencies mean in the East African context, and which of these should be prioritized and why. Second is the question of what works in nurturing these competencies in context. Third is which measurement approaches are needed and effective to assess these competencies in East Africa.

By August 2020, we had convened more than 10 learning and co-creation meetings, and three funders provided their support to kick-off this ambition. The self-empowerment journey was now in full swing, learning how to collaborate and how to develop a contextualised assessment tool. Consensus was reached among the VaLi members across the three countries, to start with three skills and one value: collaboration, problem solving, self-awareness, and respect. These were among the competencies prioritised by the curricula in the three countries, and what members felt would best represent the key domains of twenty-first century competencies — mostly the cognitive, the self, and the social domains.

Unique to ALIVE tool development was the choice to balance between process and product. First, a contextualisation study was conducted in 15 districts across the three countries, covering a wide range of cultural and economic contexts. This qualitative study targeted the clarification of the constructs informed by adolescents, their parents and teachers, and other persons working with this age group. It also generated raw material for the assessment questions, items, and tasks. Second, a mapping process was applied to identify 47 East Africans who had the disposition or interest to learn how to develop the assessments. They were drawn from government institutions, university departments, civil society organizations doing this sort of work in the region, and a few teachers as well as parents. Professor Esther Care (then of University of Melbourne) was invited as the process facilitator, teacher, and mentor. It took 45 weeks through COVID, multiple workshops (sometimes virtual and other times blended, with Tanzanians mostly able to hold in-person meetings), to apply the contextualisation results and outcomes of global literature reviews to develop skill structures, skill definitions, and the assessment framework and generate and pre-test the assessment items and tasks that formed the ALiVE tool.

Over this same period, two other processes were underway. The ALiVE Learning Community was convening virtual learning sessions (LearnShops) to build clarity on various assessment aspects and building momentum for learning, while public awareness and advocacy activities spoke on the importance of holistic education that included life skills and values.

A highlight in the journey was the household assessment conducted between April and August 2020 in 20 counties in Kenya, 45 districts in Tanzania, and 20 districts in Uganda, reaching over 45,000 adolescents aged 13-17 years. We celebrate this not just as the first assessment of this scale on the continent, but also the value drawn from direct interaction with parents and community members in the tens of thousands of households that we visited across East Africa. Moreover, close to 1000 teacher trainees (and some teachers) were involved as assessors, offering them hands-on opportunity in conducting this kind of assessment, a valuable skill for their future teaching endeavors. This assessment was not just about delivering data; learning, awareness, and advocacy were its core ingredients.

Preface xi

This book compiles the perspectives emerging from the assessment process and results, as well as the localised experiences generated from this initiative. Given that more than half of the authors here are practitioners and not scholars, the authoring process was itself a learning agenda. Prof Esther Care, Dr Mauro Giacomazzi, and I offered time to train on academic writing, support to conceptualise the chapters, and exposure to relevant literature to draw from. Hidden in this book is the precious treasure of self-trust and determination, mutual purpose, and collaborative work. The book is a gift to ourselves, a shared mission with our education systems, and a special dedication to the children of East Africa. We hope it will be useful to you as reader, and a welcome to join our efforts in achieving our vision of learners who have embodied these competencies and are thriving in school, in work, and in life.

Nairobi, Kenya John Kabutha Mugo

Acknowledgement

The ALIVE leadership team acknowledges all partners and friends who have contributed to this publication, and to ALIVE as a program. We are indebted to our government partners in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, and the college of experts that made this work possible. We thank the partners who so generously fund our work, Wellspring Philanthropic Fund, Echidna Giving, Imaginable Futures, The LEGO Foundation and Porticus, and the personal contribution brought to this work by Dr Joyce Malombe, Erin Ganju, Samuel Mugacha, Eve Hadshar, and Rosemary Oyollo. We celebrate this work together, for Africa’s and the world’s children.

xiii

Contents

1 Global to Regional: From Twenty-First Century Esther Care

2 Generating Evidence from Life Skills Assessments Khadija Shariff, Devotha Festo Mlay, and Samuel Otieno Owino

3 The Contextualisation of 21st Century Skills m EtA 665.6505 $-8-4.bae eb hous eae eee benedwneie ead 31 Mauro Giacomazzi

Chapter 2 A Generating Evidence from Life Skills gest Assessments to Inform Policy in East Africa

Khadija Shariff, Devotha Festo Mlay, and Samuel Otieno Owino

Abstract Life skills are rapidly becoming recognised as critical skills for children to acquire in order to succeed in school and in life. This is particularly true in the sub-Saharan African (SSA) context where youth educational attainment is low, unemployment and informal employment is high and a growing youth bulge provides both an opportunity and a high risk for the development or under development of SSA countries. Developing appropriate life skills and values in youth has become imperative for education systems in order to ensure youth have the chance to succeed, especially in terms of employment after finishing school. Global large-scale learning assessments have primarily been focused on basic or foundational competencies such as literacy and numeracy. These assessments have paved the way in showing how large-scale evidence generation can influence policy and practice in different countries. When it comes to the life skills and values space however, few assessments have produced evidence to influence systemic shifts in educational delivery. This chapter outlines how the Assessment of Life skills and Values in East Africa (ALIVE) collaboration has addressed gaps in large scale evidence of life skills and values, and more specifically a lack of life skills and values assessments contextual to East Africa.

K. Shariff (œ<) Milele Zanzibar Foundation, Zanzibar, Tanzania e-mail: kshariff@mzfn.org

D. F. Mlay Zizi Afrique Foundation, Nairobi, Kenya e-mail: dmlay @ziziafrique.org

S. O. Owino Global E-Schools and Communities Initiative (GESCD, Nairobi, Kenya e-mail: sotieno @ ziziafrique.org

© The Author(s) 2024 17 E. Care et al. (eds.), The Contextualisation of 21st Century Skills, The Enabling Power of Assessment 11, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-03 1-5 1490-6_2

18 K. Shariff et al. 2.1 Introduction

Values and life skills are understood and defined differently in different contexts (Care, 2024, Joynes et al., 2019). A process initiated in East Africa by members of the Regional Education Learning Initiative (RELI) in 2018 explored the use of the different conceptualizations in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda. Umbrella terms such as twenty-first century skills, social-emotional learning competencies, transferable and transversal skills, soft skills, and whole child development competencies were explored. It was concluded that despite the perception of ‘life skills’ referring to the need to equip children with attitudes and behaviours to support the control of HIV- AIDS and substance use in several African contexts (Akyeampong, 2014), the term was also accepted in curriculum as referring to the more generic skills. Beyond the concept of skills was a set of personal attributes which constituted values. The RELI group then adopted life skills and values as the overall concept for use in their work in East Africa, and the Assessment of Life Skills and Values in East Africa (ALIVE) initiative was born.

This chapter reviews the use of learning assessments to influence policy. The review provides a context for ALiVE’s goals, the challenges it is designed to address, and how it addresses them to ensure children in East Africa acquire life skills and values to thrive in school and in life.

There is an increasingly identifiable link between these generic skills and work readiness that is considered urgent especially in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). According to the Global Employment Trends for Youth 2022 report (International Labor Organization, 2022), youth unemployment in Africa is below the world average for both men and women, with women at 13.3% and men at 12.3%, for a total average of 12.7% in 2022. The seemingly low levels of unemployment reflect the fact that most young people in SSA cannot afford to remain unemployed. What is often not reflected in the numbers is the quality of employment and the need to engage in insecure, often low-productivity, jobs for income (International Labor Organization, 2022). Many young people are engaged in informal jobs due to there being a lack of alternative options and little information and support with regard to other options. This is a cause for concern. The growing youth bulge presents an opportunity for future development of countries willing to tap into the so-called demographic dividend through investment in human capital. This investment would contribute to ensuring that young people develop the technical and socio-emotional skills and values necessary to become productive and contributing members of society (UK Aid, 2018). On the other hand, it is feared that if highly youthful societies do not take advantage of the demographic dividend, it may result in detrimental side-effects, exacerbating crime, violence, and continued poverty (UK Aid, 2018).

Recent studies in employability conducted in East Africa are showing that more effort is needed to invest in education and skills building of youth in the region. A study on perceptions of employability skills needed by employers and final year students from Higher Education Institutions in East Africa revealed a significant difference in prioritization of the employability skills between employers and final

2 Generating Evidence from Life Skills Assessments to Inform Policy in East Africa 19 year students (Kalufya & Mwakajinga, 2016). Another study assessing perceptions of academics, employers, and civil servants regarding graduates’ employability skills in East Africa revealed general perceptions that graduates’ skills are insufficiently developed (Guardia et al., 2021). An Inter University Council for East Africa (IUCEA) survey polling employers across the region concluded that graduates lacked employability skills including technical mastery and basic work-related capabilities (IUCEA, 2014). Additionally, a study was conducted in Kenya in 2017 to explore ‘soft skills’ nurturing among Technical and Vocational Education and Training institutions and preparation of students for self-employment. The study showed that Technical and Vocational Education and Training institutions did not nurture soft skills such as time management, problem solving, decision making, and creativity and others for their survival and self-employment (Murgor, 2017). In Uganda, the Skilling Uganda Business, Technical and Vocational Education and Training Strategic Plan affirms that more than 60% of large and medium sized companies consider the training provided by such institutions to be irrelevant to their requirements (Mitana et al., 2019). According to the IUCEA, over half the graduates from the East Africa Community region lack the necessary skills to be employed in the labour market and over 40% of them lack adequate soft skills or life skills (IUCEA, 2014). While those going to school and graduating from higher education institutions lack adequate skills for employment, even more concerning is the large number of youth in East Africa who are Not in Education, Employment or Training. These youth, along with the more than 20% of East Africa youth who are recorded as unemployed, make up a large segment of the youth population. This points to a dire need to address the shortcomings in the education sector that are signified by high dropout rates and exit from schooling without adequate skills and qualifications to progress in life.

2.2 Learning Assessments as Evidence for Influencing Policy

Learning assessment data have been used by education systems and development partners to shape education policy and practice. Notably, UNESCO’s Institute of Statistics (UIS) has identified several cross-national learning assessments that meet the criteria to measure the proportion of children and young people achieving minimum proficiency in reading and mathematics to inform monitoring under the Sustainable Development Goal 4. International large-scale assessments drawn upon include the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMMS), and Literacy and Numeracy Assessment (LaNA).

Regionally, most notable large-scale assessments are Southern and Eastern Africa Consortium for Monitoring Education Quality (SACMEQ), Programme for the Analysis of Education Systems (PASEC), Pacific Islands Literacy and Numeracy Assessment (PILNA), Southeast Asia Primary Learning Metrics (SEA-PLM), and Regional Comparative and Explanatory Study (ERCE). Other assessments that are implemented both regionally and nationally are Early Grade Mathematics Assessment (EGMA) and Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA). UNESCO, UNICEF, and the World Bank as development partners, also conducted the Measuring Early Learning Quality and Outcomes (MELQO) program.

Regional assessments are of course facilitated at country level. For example, UNICEF administered MELQO in collaboration with the National Examination Council of Tanzania in 2015. In Kenya, the Kenya National Examination Council administered SACMEQ. True national assessments are typically undertaken by ministries of education. For example, in Uganda, the Uganda National Examination Board administers the National Assessment of Progress in Education (NAPE) focused on Grades 3 and 6; since 1996 at primary school level and 2008 at secondary school level. NAPE collects data on cognitive and non-cognitive skills, and findings are reported at national and sub national levels.

Learning assessments such as these have contributed to informing the formulation, implementation, and review of educational policies and practices globally. For instance, Lockheed et al. (2015) established that donors use PISA results in dialogue with middle-income countries to set agenda relating to reform of curricula, standards, and teacher professional development.

In East Africa, the Uwezo citizen-led assessment has been implemented for more than 6 years across Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, and has focused on assessing learning outcomes related to numeracy and literacy. Its aim is to provide credible data that stimulates policy dialogues and drives educational reforms by using the clarion call ‘Are our children learning ?’. Although with varying degrees of acceptance and acknowledgment by the respective governments, the Uwezo assessments in the three countries have helped to draw attention and spark dialogue on the poor learning outcomes across schools in the three countries (Nakabugo, 2021).

2.2.1 The Pitfalls and Challenges of Evidence Use

Education systems worldwide face pressure due to the increasing number of children entering formal education, and to the need to deliver education of high quality that is relevant for the fast-changing and complex world. Research-based evidence can positively impact quality, design, and effectiveness of policies (Goldman & Pabari, 2021). In fact, better utilization of research and evidence in development policy and practice can help save lives, reduce poverty, and improve the quality of life (Young, 2005). Using research to inform policy and practice: (1) ensures that policy decisions are informed by and anchored on a solid evidence base; (2) minimizes policy failures and waste of resources on unworkable programs; and (3) can drive innovations which have the potential to transform societies. One example of evidence generation both informing and resulting from national level policy and practice that contributes to global transformative development is the monitoring and gathering of data for tracking the Sustainable Development Goals through UIS. The UIS has set up an infrastructure that facilitates sharing of data and evidence from

2 Generating Evidence from Life Skills Assessments to Inform Policy in East Africa 21 each participating country. The UIS guidelines provide for different approaches to be used to generate evidence as long as the data is credible, reliable, and can provide insights into areas or sectors being analysed.

There is evidence that the relationship between evidence production and its utilization may not be linear (Manning et al., 2020), meaning that data availability is not the main reason for failure to use evidence for decision making. Studies have shown that even though more learning data have become available in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), they have not been effectively used in educational planning. For instance, a three-country study on use of learning assessments across Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda revealed several factors that hinder the uptake and utilization of education data and evidence in education policy making (GESCI, 2022). The main factors included poor conceptualisation of learning assessments, minimal capacity to interpret data and evidence, poor attitudes towards learning assessments, weak institutionalization of research, weak dissemination, and poor stakeholder engagement (GESCI, 2022). Another study that covered Ghana, Guinea, Namibia, Senegal, The Gambia, and Zambia found that lack of capacity to analyse learning data, lack of assessment data integration with other data sources, missing feedback loops between different administrative levels, and the absence of a comprehensive policy framework for producing learning data, also impedes their effective use (IIEP-UNESCO, 2022).

Policy making is an intricate and multi-stage process (Anderson et al., 2022). Influencing policy and practice is an iterative process that considers several factors, particularly the political and socio-economic environment where the action is taking place. Policy influencing refers to how “external actors are able to interact with the policy process and affect the policy positions, approaches and behaviors” (Court et al., 2006, p. 6). In reality, policy making does not follow a linear approach and usually involves both formal and informal processes across a range of actors and institutions until the intended policy influencing objective is reached (Court et al., 2006). According to a study on experiences with evidence-informed policy, influencing is often a complex web of processes that requires different ingredients including: a robust evidence base, building coalitions, learning the rules of the game in many different systems, and a process of continuous reflection and change in the light of experience and context (Mayne et al., 2018).

2.2.2 Addressing Gaps in Evidence and Policy

The Assessment of Life Skills and Values in East Africa (ALIVE) intentions were stimulated both by the documented gap between labour market and appropriately skilled workforce and by the challenges experienced in the education systems in East African countries, specifically Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda as they responded and adapted to the growing market demands, through reforms in the formal education system. These two categories of concern overlap in several ways, with their foundations rooted in societal norms about education. Three specific responses from ALiVE are discussed in this section.

2.2.2.1 Evidence and Capacity Limitations

The first gap addressed by ALIVE is the absence of a large-scale assessment of life skills and values, and the limited capacities of practitioners in the region to generate this evidence. Although there is evidence of large-scale assessments impacting policy, as noted above these have primarily targeted literacy and numeracy achievement. In the life skills and values space, there have been few large-scale assessments, although there are some tools that target child wellbeing and social-emotional development. The tools are mainly from the United States and other high-income countries. Some of the most popular include the International Development and Early Learning Assessment (IDELA; Save the Children, 2019), MELQO (UNESCO et al., 2017), the Social-Emotional Assessment/Evaluation Measure (SEAM; Squires et al., 2013), the Child Behavior Questionnaire (CBQ; Goodman & Scott, 1999), and International Social and Emotional Learning Assessment (ISELA; D’Sa & Krupar, 2019). Their focus is mainly on the early years and not the pre-pubescent or adolescent years. In terms of types of assessments, many are self-rating scales, and none of them have been developed for SSA contexts. A study commissioned by Echidna Giving in 2018 (Wamahiu & Bapna, 2019) that mapped life skills implementation across East Africa revealed that although organizations in East Africa are working on nurturing life skills and values, few are using contextually relevant tools. In most organizations that are engaged in the programs, test and scale development expertise, and large-scale assessment capacity, is low. ALiVE’s response has been to design, plan and implement a large-scale assessment of life skills and values across Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda.

2.2.2.2 Limited Contextual Understanding of Life Skills and Values

The second gap addressed by ALIVE is the absence of contextual definition of life skills and values in East Africa. Terms used to describe generic cognitive and social-emotional skills or life skills vary in the education space. Values, and how they are defined or understood, are intertwined in a cultural, social or political context. Wamahiu and Bapna (2019) revealed that in East Africa there is no common understanding of these skills, and little understanding of how to develop or measure them. This situation has also been documented in Asia and the Asia-Pacific (e.g., Care & Luo, 2016). Education systems are faced with the need to define and describe these skills in ways that make sense to the broader population and especially to parents, in ways that will engage community support to change perceptions of what education provides and what this might mean for how different qualities in children might be valued. Without these common understandings, the historical prioritization by parents and teachers of academic scores at the expense of other competencies