Generic Skills in the Context of Higher Education
- 1 January 1995
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Taylor & Francis in Higher Education Research & Development
- Vol. 14 (2) , 155-166
- https://doi.org/10.1080/0729436950140202
Abstract
The Higher Education Council Report Achieving Quality (October 1992) identifies ‘generic skills, attributes and values’ as the ‘central achievements of higher education as a process’. The account which the Report offers of those generic skills and of the graduate ‘attributes and values’ which, it claims, should accompany them is flawed, however, by a pervasive vagueness and inconsistency. Personal qualities, generalized capacities, individual attitudes, value systems, professional competencies, higher order generic skills and lower order technical ones are all lumped together in a general hodge‐podge of desirable graduate attributes. In the present paper the authors offer a more systematic, though still preliminary, analysis of higher order generic skills as they manifest themselves in thinking, research and communication, and of the way in which these skills assume a variety of different forms in their different disciplinary contexts. Definitional work of this kind, the authors argue, is currently neglected, but it remains a fundamental pre‐condition for any successful review or audit of Quality in undergraduate education.Keywords
This publication has 1 reference indexed in Scilit:
- Transferable skills: A philosophical perspectiveStudies in Higher Education, 1993