Cognitive Flexibility Theory and the Assessment of 21st-Century Skills

Following longstanding, foundational tenets of Cognitive Flexibility Theory (CFT), one can call those special features of the 21st-century world and their entailments for learning, irregularity of concept application and combination across situations, disorderliness, and the nonroutine becoming routine, richness and novelty of situations leading to a need for nonlinear processing, multiple perspectives, and adaptive knowledge assembly, ill-structuredness and learning in ill-structured domains. In ill-structured domains, concepts do not have an essentialist definitional core. Related to conceptual variability, an important aspect of learning in ill-structured domains is the ability to identify surprising concept-application differences between similarly appearing contexts and surprising concept-application similarities across differently appearing contexts. Knowledge application in 21st-century domains is increasingly a dynamic process rather than a simple retrieval and instantiation of a stored schema or the intact application of a template or cognitive 'chunk'. The cognitive processes of 21st-century learning require as a foundation an underlying set of epistemic beliefs and preferences consonant with that kind of learning.