Discovering the Learning and Teaching Approaches of Transferable Skills to Engage Students

Abstract

Given the growing attention among students, teachers and employers on the importance of transferable skills for both education and employment, there is a need to understand students’ perception of these skills before effective teaching approaches and assessment strategies can be developed to improve the teaching and learning of transferable skills. Studies on students’ perception of transferable skills have found that students’ perceived importance of and competency in transferable skills vary by skill. However, it is unclear to what extent these findings can be applied to the Hong Kong context as the majority of the studies were conducted in Western countries. In view of these issues, this paper presents a study conducted in Hong Kong on STEM students’ perception of transferable skills. A questionnaire was developed and administered to 1232 STEM students, who were required to self-assess their perceived importance level of and competency level in 38 transferable skills. They were also asked to indicate their attitude towards the teaching and learning approaches and assessment of transferable skills. It was found that students tended to give themselves a higher rating for their perceived level of importance of the transferable skills than their perceived competency level in those skills. It was also found that students generally believe that transferable skills are better developed through extra-curricular activities and majority of them disagreed that learning these skills is irrelevant. The findings will be discussed.