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List of literacy skills


What are literacy skills? | Thoughtful Learning K-12

Literacy skills help students gain knowledge through reading as well as using media and technology. These skills also help students create knowledge through writing as well as developing media and technology.

Information Literacy

Students need to be able to work effectively with information, using it at all levels of Bloom's Taxonomy (remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating). Information literacy involves traditional skills such as reading, researching, and writing; but new ways to read and write have also introduced new skills:

  • Consuming information: The current excess of information requires students to gain new skills in handling it. When most information came through official publications like books, newspapers, magazines, and television shows, students encountered data that had been prepared by professionals. Now, much information is prepared by amateurs. Some of that work is reliable, but much is not. Students must take on the role of the editor, checking and cross-checking information, watching for signs of bias, datedness, and errors. Students need to look at all information as the product of a communication situation, with a sender, subject, purpose, medium, receiver, and context.
  • Producing information: In the past, students were mostly consumers of information. When they produced information, it was largely for a single reader—the teacher—and was produced for a grade. It was therefore not an authentic communication situation, and students felt that writing was a purely academic activity. Now writing is one of the main ways students communicate. It has real-world applications and consequences. Students need to understand that what they write can do great good or great harm in the real world, and that how they write determines how powerful their words are. Students need to take on the role of professional writers, learning to be effective and ethical producers of information.

Media Literacy

Media literacy involves understanding the many ways that information is produced and distributed. The forms of media have exploded in the last decade and new media arrive every day:

Students' use of media has far outstripped educational use, and students will continue to adopt new media long before teachers can create curricula about it. It is no longer enough to teach students how books, periodicals, and TV shows work. Students need to learn how to critically analyze and evaluate messages coming to them through any medium.

As with information literacy, the key is to recognize the elements of the communication situation—sender, message (subject and purpose), medium, receiver, and context. These elements are constant regardless of the medium used. By broadening the student's perspective to see all media as part of a larger communication situation, we can equip students to effectively receive and send information in any medium. Students must learn to recognize the strengths and weaknesses of each medium and to analyze each message they receive and send.

Technology Literacy

We are living through a technological revolution, with huge changes taking place over brief spans of time. A decade ago, Facebook didn't exist, but now many people could not live without it. The average cellphone is now more powerful than computers from several years ago. We are surrounded by technology, and most of it performs multiple functions. In Growing Up Digital: How the Net Generation Is Changing Your World, Don Tapscott outlines the following eight expectations that students have of technology.

  • Freedom to express their views, personalities, and identities
  • Ability to customize and personalize technology to their own tastes
  • Ability to dig deeper, finding whatever information they want
  • Honesty in interactions with others and with organizations
  • Fun to be part of learning, work, and socialization as well as entertainment
  • Connecting to others and collaborating in everything
  • Speed and responsiveness in communication and searching for answers
  • Innovation and change, not settling for familiar technologies but seeking and using what is new and better

As you can see, students expect a great deal out of their technologies. You can help them use technology wisely:

  • reading Web sites;
  • using search engines;
  • using map searches;
  • accessing videos, podcasts, and feeds;
  • evaluating Web resources;
  • researching on the Internet;
  • e-mailing, chatting, texting, microblogging;
  • using social sites;
  • visiting virtual worlds;
  • blogging and using wikis; and
  • using message boards, newsgroups, and VOIP (Skype).

By understanding how to evaluate this new information and how to use these new tools to create effective, well-grounded communication, students can harness the power of new technology and be inspired to learn.

What Are the Different Types of Literacy Skills?

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There are several types of literacy skills that, when learned in early childhood, provide the foundation for solid reading and writing capabilities. These basic skills make it possible for a person to process information so that language can be understood, written or described orally. Vocabulary skills, narrative and phonological skills as well as the ability to understand printed words are important. Reading comprehension skills and writing skills are also necessary, and it is a good sign if a young child shows interest in reading materials and in being read to.

Vocabulary is one of the most important literacy skills. Being able to read involves knowing thousands of words, and without this knowledge, following a story, whether it is fiction or nonfiction, is impossible. Learning vocabulary starts at an early age, and even preschool-age children can be taught words just by having older people point out items at home, in the store or outdoors and telling them what the items are.

Literacy skills include more than just knowing what things are. An essential skill is also the ability to know what letters and words sound like. This is important for reading as well as writing, and it even assists in the creative process because phonological skills make it possible to piece together parts of words and make rhymes. The ability to put word and sound elements together makes it easier to process reading material.

It also is important to know what each letter is, as well as how each can be arranged to form words. Letter recognition doesn’t always mean recognizing the sound of each, but these two concepts together improve literacy skills drastically. Understanding how print is organized on a page does this as well. In the English language, this means knowing the left-to-right and top-to-bottom organization of a narrative. Knowledge of sentence structure and punctuation are additional literacy elements that need to be learned and understood.

Without any of these literacy skills, reading comprehension is extremely difficult. This lack of understanding also makes it hard to tell a story, which is a skill in itself. Narrative skills rely on a person’s own internal skill set to say or to write what happened at a particular event. They also help children understand what they are learning when books are read to them or when they are being taught to read. All of these literacy skills can be applied to many analytical and computational tasks later on, and they are imperative for anyone to be able to read and write well.

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Human Skills of the 21st Century - rcpp.

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Human Skills of the 21st Century

Human Skills of the 21st Century is a set of abilities that must be developed in order to succeed in the Information Age.

In the era of industrialization, it was important for workers to be able to accumulate knowledge and repeatedly repeat well-adjusted actions, to clearly follow instructions. But modern conditions require a perfect person to have other skills. Now you have every chance to step into a new day with the skills that will be useful in it.

1. Critical thinking

The ability of a person to question the information received, to check it and the reliability of its source, to ask questions, to compare with already known data.

2. Social intelligence

The ability to recognize and understand various manifestations of other people (tone, mood, emotions) can greatly increase the productivity of communication. Well-developed communication skills are a guarantee that a person will be able not only to create the most suitable environment around him, but also to interact effectively with the people around him.

3. Creativity

If a person is able to think outside the box and adapt to changing conditions, he can most productively resolve issues of absolutely any complexity, generate new things and find positive aspects even in the most seemingly hopeless situations.

4. Information literacy

The ability to work with information efficiently. It is important to learn how to filter information, to extract from its huge stream only what is really important, and to filter out everything that is secondary and doubtful.

5. Digital Literacy

This skill is the safe and effective use of digital technologies and Internet resources and includes the ability to create multimedia content, search and exchange information, collaborate in the virtual space, use the functionality of social networks.

6. Media Literacy

It is important to understand how the media works, to think about what you hear, read, watch, to be able to recognize media manipulations. Mastering modern media gives a person a wide range of opportunities: from meeting new people and searching for information to making deals and communicating with potential customers.

7. Flexibility, readiness to change

Today, more than ever, it is necessary to be able to quickly adapt to changing conditions. Knowing when to change, how to change, and how to respond to change is a skill that will pay dividends for a lifetime.

8. Initiative

The ability to set goals, plan the process of achieving them from the initial to the final stage, be persistent, be responsible and capable of independent work. AT XXI employees who are ready not only to fulfill their duties, but also to offer new non-standard ideas are valued in the century.

9. Productivity

Goal setting, work prioritization, and proper use of time are all skills that help you be effective at work as well as at school.

10. Cultural competence

In our country it is not enough to know a foreign language. For productive and effective interaction with people of other cultures, you already need to be familiar with their language, traditions, customs, and ethical standards.

Based on “21 century skills. Learning for life in our times" B. Trilling, Ch. Fadel

Skills of the future: what you need to know and be able to do in the 21st century

Photo: Fauxels / Pexels

Applied skills, like programming, will not be important in the new complex world. This is reported by the authors of the report "Skills of the Future". We explain why thousands of skills will become useless, and what is worth learning in the 21st century

To form a skill, you need to gain knowledge and work it out in practice. Knowledge is information that we receive and remember for ourselves. There are many sources of knowledge: books, articles, lectures, personal communication, advice from a mentor. Let's take driving a car as an example. The study of the structure of the car, the rules of the road and the theory of driving is knowledge.

Application of knowledge in practice, the first and not yet worked out experience is a skill. The skill will be driving around the city or training ground. This is what we get rights with, the skill is not yet formed.

For example, Margaret Heffernan, former CEO of five companies, explains why fewer technical and more human skills are needed in an unpredictable world: dependent on changes in external conditions. Confident driving regardless of the weather, emergency situations and other external factors is a skill.

In the 20th century, the main task of mass education was to teach people to read, write and count. Then literate workers formed skills for specific professions in technical schools, universities and courses. At that time, professional tasks hardly changed. It was enough to hone a few skills to climb the career ladder - for example, from a worker to a shop manager. By the beginning of the 21st century, about 85% of the world's population had basic literacy, but narrow professional skills were not enough. A complex world required new basic and professional skills.

Every industry has a small core of common skills that most workers use. At the center of this core are "basic skills", such as the ability to read, write, and count. These skills are possessed by all working people, regardless of the field of activity.

The authors of the report identified a set of competencies and "basic skills" that will be in demand in any field of human activity.

  • Concentration and control of attention. Helps manage information overload and manage complex technology.
  • Emotional literacy. Helps to preserve oneself and interact with others through emotions, empathy and compassion.
  • Digital literacy. Helps to work in a digital environment, such as AR, VR. The authors believe that digital literacy will be as in demand as the ability to write and read.
  • Creativity, creativity. Helps to think outside the box, to create something new in terms of automation of routine work.
  • Ecological thinking. Helps to understand the connectedness of the world, perceive their activities in the context of the entire ecosystem, support evolutionary processes.
  • Cross-culturality. Helps to overcome the generation gap, to understand other cultures and subcultures, to find a common language with them.
  • Ability to learn/self-learn. Helps you learn throughout your life and master skills on your own in a rapidly changing world.

The authors of "Skills of the Future" note that a person's education should not be limited to "basic skills". In the 21st century, it is important to move from a utilitarian industrial education to an integral educational paradigm. The traditional paradigm strictly singled out education from other spheres of life, and included only students in order to prepare them for the future life. The new paradigm is continuous - it involves learning for all people throughout life. Such an education system focuses not only on the transfer of knowledge and the development of skills, but also on supporting the development of a person as a full-fledged author in all areas of his life.

It is dangerous to expand educational programs indefinitely to include all sorts of skills and knowledge. According to the “Skills of the Future” study by the Moscow School of Management “Skolkovo”, most of the skills of specialists in a “difficult” workplace are unique, highly specialized skills. They are used by one or more employees in each enterprise or in the entire industry. Hundreds and even thousands of specific skills that are needed to perform specific tasks in specific conditions create a "long tail". For example, a programmer uses "basic" and professional skills every day - communicates with colleagues, reads instructions, writes code in a programming language. The skill of working in Photoshop and HTML is applied twice a year - they and a hundred other skills create a “long tail”. With the complication of the world, such a "tail" is constantly increasing - and this is normal.

Skills long tail from the Skills of the Future report (Photo: Moscow School of Management Skolkovo)

Skills Long Tail from the Skills of the Future report (Photo: Moscow School of Management Skolkovo)

The Skolkovo Moscow School of Management screened the skills of 2,000 engineers in 2014. Engineers worked in leading companies in aviation, shipbuilding, the nuclear industry, and the production of new materials. The researchers looked at 400 employees' LinkedIn profiles for each category. Engineers of different specializations indicated from 950 to 1500 skills.

Number of skills listed in the profiles of engineers in various industries (Photo: Moscow School of Management Skolkovo)

The number of skills listed in the profiles of engineers in various industries (Photo: Moscow School of Management Skolkovo)

As a result of the study, it turned out that most skills are 80-90% in each of the directions is found in less than 1% of engineers. Of these, about half of the skills are absolutely unique and occur only once in the entire sample. Only 30% of the skills were indicated by the majority of engineers.

The authors of the report propose to focus on the development of "basic skills", supplementing them with professional skills. Choose educational programs that focus on them, and study highly specialized ones on your own.

In modern management theory, skills are divided into "hard" (hard skills) and "flexible" (soft skills). Hard skills help you perform specific tasks with a verifiable measurable result: driving a car, programming in Java or knowing Spanish. Soft skills help to solve life and professional tasks with a result that is difficult to track and verify. For example, communication with colleagues, time management or projects. Most educational programs emphasize hard skills. Flexible ones complement and give additional qualities.

A simple model of professional competencies in the form of a doll. “Hard” skills inside, “flexible” skills outside (Photo: Moscow School of Management Skolkovo)

A simple model of professional competencies in the form of a doll. “Hard” skills inside, “flexible” skills outside (Photo: Moscow School of Management Skolkovo)

The authors propose a new model consisting of four skill levels.

  1. Contextual/highly specialized Skills that are developed and applied in a specific context. For example, programming in Python or driving a car. Hard skills are included in this category, but are not limited.
  2. Cross-contextual - Skills that people apply in broader areas of social or personal activities: reading, time management, teamwork skills.
  3. Metaskills - modes of controlling objects in our mind or physical world, close to Howard Gardner's theory of "multiple intelligences". According to the theory, a person has several independent abilities of intelligence. Abilities are revealed in solving special problems of different fields and disciplines.
  4. "Existential" - skills that we universally apply throughout life in various personal life contexts. For example, willpower is the ability to set goals to achieve them, awareness is self-awareness and the ability to self-reflection, self-development is the ability to learn, unlearn and relearn.

New 21st century skills model from the Skills of the Future report (Photo: Moscow School of Management Skolkovo)

A new model of skills for the 21st century from the Skills of the Future report (Photo: Moscow School of Management Skolkovo)

The authors of the report assemble the matryoshka in a different order. It will be based on "existential" and meta-skills - they determine the character of a person and form the ability to control the internal and external world. The next layer will be cross-context skills, on which any human activity relies. On the outer layer are contextual skills. They will change depending on time, tasks and context. To cope with the challenges of the new world, you will have to learn all your life.

Economics of education Lifelong education: why study all your life

Competence layers of the new model reflect different human life cycles. Contextual skills, including hard skills, can be acquired in months or years, but due to the changing context, they can quickly become obsolete. Cross-context skills take longer to become obsolete, but they take longer to master.

Life cycle of skills (Photo: Global Education Futures)

Life cycle of skills (Photo: Global Education Futures)

Metaskills and existential skills have the longest life cycle. Usually acquired in childhood, such skills rarely change, but it is possible. If you rebuild existential skills purposefully, many aspects of life will change.

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