Developing and Validating a Soft Skills Assessment Scale for Psychoeducational Assessment

There are concerns that soft skills assessment has been conceptualized within the Western context and may not reflect the indigenous African worldview. Without relevant soft skills assessment contextualized in the African cultural cosmology, there is a limitation in assessing African conceptions of abilities. The purpose of this study was to identify relevant soft skills for secondary/high school students and develop a scale relevant for assessing soft skills in Botswana. An exploratory sequential mixed methods design was used to explore the perceptions of 23 education stakeholders on relevant soft skills for secondary students through in-depth interviews. The qualitative findings were used to develop a 63-item Soft Skills Assessment Scale which was administered to a sample of 306 senior secondary school students selected from three educational regions in Botswana. Exploratory factor analysis was conducted to assess the latent factor structure of the scale. Through principal component analysis, four factors were extracted with underlying 38 items. However, a confirmatory factor analysis confirmed a four-factor model (Perseverance, Civic virtue, Teamwork, and Communication) based on a final 14-item scale with Cronbach’s alphas above .60 and Cronbach’s alpha of .82 for the entire scale. Convergent and discriminant validities of the scale were within an acceptable range. The key contribution of this study was the development of a psychometrically valid and reliable Soft Skills Assessment Scale (SSAS) in the context of Botswana.