Measuring skills
Measuring skills will depend entirely on the skills you wish to evaluate. For example, discipline-specific skills are best evaluated together with local experts. David Schwinghamer (personal communication, November 12, 2019), an English teacher at Collège Ahuntsic, told us about having a professor attend his students’ presentations during their combined English and Biology trip [PDF, 918k]:
They were actually presenting and then we have our professor there who’s hearing this stuff about volcanology and all that. So, they’re presenting to an expert, which can be intimidating, but then the expert would just say things that – while the presentation was happening saying, “Yeah, yeah, that’s true what she’s just saying about Saddle Road and its history.” [The expert] would add something else he knows from a personal story or from somebody over there and so it really made the experience a positive one because it was relevant communication.
Having a local in attendance served to validate the information that students presented and therefore enrich the presentations. It was a way of extending the learning so that even during an evaluation, such as an oral presentation, students were developing a deeper, connected understanding of the material due to the participation of the local expert.
For non-discipline-specific skills, we recommend using the AKI Tool Kit. The AKI Tool Kit was developed by ERASMUS+ (2019) (the European Union’s program for Education, Training, Youth, and Sport) to help young people identify transversal skills they develop through international experiences. The five transversal skills are open-mindedness, adaptation to change, interpersonal relations, sense of responsibility, and self-confidence. To trace learners’ development, the AKI Tool Kit provides both pre-departure and in-trip (or post-trip) assessments, asking students to self-rate the five skills and provide examples. Understanding how travel develops transversal skills is useful for employability purposes and for helping students gain admission to competitive programs, since it enables students to better articulate the growth they experienced. Moreover, the AKI Tool Kit can be easily adapted to different situations and can also be used to facilitate discussion.