Construction of a Life and Career Skill Test Basing on the Concept of 21st- Century Skills for Senior High School Students

Abstract

The purposes of this research were: 1) to build a life and career skill test; 2) to find the quality of the life and career skill test; and 3) to build the norms of the life and career skill test basing on the concept of 21^st- century for students in senior high school. The sample consisted of 618 senior high school students in the 2^nd semester of the academic year 2016 in the schools under the Office of Secondary Education Service Area 25, obtained through multi-stage random sampling.

               The results were as follows:

1. The life and career skill test had 40 items. They were divided into aspects: 8 items on flexibility and adaptability; 8 items on initiative and self-direction; 8 items on social and cross-cultural skills ; 8 items on productivity and accountability; and 8 items on leadership and responsibility.


2. The quality of the life and career skill test had the index of item-objective congruence (IOC) of 0.60 – 1.00, the discrimination of 0.319 – 0.748, the total reliability of 0.910. The construct validity obtained through second order confirmatory factor analysis revealed that the 5 aspects of the life and career skill test had the weight, ranked in descending order, as follows: leadership and responsibility, productivity and accountability, social and cross-cultural skill, flexibility and adaptability and initiative and self-direction, with the factor loadings of 0.993, 0.956, 0.936, 0.808 and 0.799, respectively, and with the index of consistency with empirical data. The chi-square value was 503.846; chi–square test of model fit was 1.105; the probability was 0.0601; the root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) was 0.013; the comparative fit index (CFI) was 0.993; the Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI) was 0.988; the standardized root mean square residual (SRMR) was 0.050. All of these findings indicated that the model had validity.


3. The norms in the form of normal T score showed the values from T24 to T72.