KAHOKO MATSUMOTO -

ASSESSING JAPANESE STUDENTS’ READINESS FOR GLOBAL CITIZENSHIP : OTHERS

Prompted by the Japanese Ministry of Education’s initiative to produce future “global human resources,” Japanese universities have been offering new courses with an emphasis on English and critical thinking/problem-solving skills. However, the aimed skills are varied, and more importantly, they represent only a part of what makes a person a global citizen who can successfully manage various intercultural situations. In the previous study, 40 descriptors for global citizenship were ascertained by the extensive online survey with more than 400 internationally successful workers in various sectors. First, an assessment rubric for these 40 items were developed, which serves as a metric for evaluating young people’s readiness for global citizenship. Then, depending on the different nature of skills and competencies, a portfolio-type assessment tool consisting of essay-type test items and a checklist was constructed. After a series of validation experiments of this tool with university students and modifications based on them, now it exhibits quite good validity and reliability. So, a new attempt of creating the simplified versions for high school and elementary school students was launched, because global citizenship education should start early and the objectives and assessments at different educational stages should be consistent and accumulatively connected. In this presentation, an interim report of the validation results of the simplified versions of this assessment tool will be explained. So far, they showed sufficient measurement power except for a few skills and competencies. Also, considerably high inter-rater reliability as well as correlations between objective rater evaluation and self-assessment were obtained.

Kahoko Matsumoto, Ph.D. has been teaching English and applied linguistics subjects in the Tokyo Metropolitan area over 20 years. Her original interest was assessment, especially that of writing, but recently, she has been involved in a series of research projects to raise intercultural competence of Japanese students as a researcher.