Development and Validation of a 21st-Century Skills Instrument Towards Sustainable Employability of Graduates of Technical and Vocational Education and Training in Nigeria
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.66545/d62m4e02Keywords:
Development, Validation, 21st century dkills, TVETAbstract
The volatile global labour market and improvements in technology demand that teaching and assessment of Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) institution programmes should focus on 21st-century skills (21CS) for the sustainable employability of the graduates. This implies that TVET institutions in Nigeria are expected to promote 21CS in their students. Traditionally, the teaching and assessment structures in the curricula of TVET institutions in Nigeria may not contain 21CS, which possibly accounts for the rising unemployment among the graduates. Since assessment plays a critical role in the actualisation of curriculum objectives, it is expected that both teachers and assessment practitioners should engage in assessment of 21CS. However, there is a lack of clarity regarding the specific 21CS that are being assessed in TVET programmes. This paper, therefore, identified 21st-century skills and developed an instrument for assessing the skills for sustainable employability. Four research questions were answered, and one hypothesis was tested. The study adopted an instrumentation research design. The population comprised all students of TVET institutions in Nigeria. Simple random sampling was used to select 2000 students of technical colleges in various trades. The Instrument for Assessing 21st Century Skills (IA21CS) was validated by four experts in measurement and evaluation and trial tested on 200 students with a Cronbach Alpha Coefficient of 0.87. Data were analysed using exploratory factor analysis and t-test statistics. Results showed that 60 out of the 100 items developed were retained in six of the fifteen factors with a high reliability coefficient of 0.95. Thus, it was recommended that the instrument be used to measure 21st-century skills of students in TVET institutions in Nigeria to promote sustainable employability of the graduates.
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