This article addresses educational challenges posed by the future of work, examining “21st century skills”, their conception, assessment, and valorization. It focuses in particular on key soft skill competencies known as the “4Cs”: creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, and communication. In a section on each C, we provide an overview of assessment at the level of individual performance, before focusing on the less common assessment of systemic support for the development of the 4Cs that can be measured at the institutional level (i.e., in schools, universities, professional training programs, etc.). We then present the process of official assessment and certification known as “labelization”, suggesting it as a solution both for establishing a publicly trusted assessment of the 4Cs and for promoting their cultural valorization. Next, two variations of the “International Institute for Competency Development’s 21st Century Skills Framework” are presented. The first of these comprehensive systems allows for the assessment and labelization of the extent to which development of the 4Cs is supported by a formal educational program or institution. The second assesses informal educational or training experiences, such as playing a game. We discuss the overlap between the 4Cs and the challenges of teaching and institutionalizing them, both of which may be assisted by adopting a dynamic interactionist model of the 4Cs—playfully entitled “Crea-Critical-Collab-ication”—for pedagogical and policy-promotion purposes. We conclude by briefly discussing opportunities presented by future research and new technologies such as artificial intelligence and virtual reality.

Society is largely shaped by creativity, making it critical to understand why, despite minimal mean gender differences in creative ability, substantial differences exist in the creative achievement of men and women. Although the greater male variability hypothesis (GMVH) in creativity has been proposed to explain women's underrepresentation as eminent creators, studies examining the GMVH are sparse and limited. This systematic review and meta-analysis were conducted to examine whether the GMVH in creativity can adequately explain the gender gap in creative achievement. We examined the GMVH in creativity, along with mean gender differences, in a range of indicators of creativity and across different sample characteristics and measurement approaches. Effect sizes (k = 1,003) were calculated using information retrieved from 194 studies (N = 68,525). Data were analyzed using three-level meta-analysis and metaregression and publication bias was evaluated using Egger's regression test and contour-enhanced funnel plots. Results revealed minimal gender differences overall, with a slight mean advantage for females (g = -0.10, 95% CI [-0.13, -0.06]) and a trivial variability advantage for males (lnVR = 0.02, 95% CI [0.004, 0.04]) in creative ability scores. However, the magnitude of the effect sizes was moderated by creative domain, task type, scoring type, and study region for mean differences and by country-level gender egalitarianism values for variability. Taken together, gender differences in the mean and variability of creative ability scores are minimal and inconsistent across different contexts, suggesting that the GMVH may not provide much explanatory power for the gender gap in creative achievement. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

The aim of the present study was to examine how social evaluation influences creative idea generation, and whether this effect develops with age. To do so, early adolescents, middle adolescents, and late adolescents performed a creative task either alone or under the supervision of an adult examiner. Three major findings emerged: 1) the social evaluation by an adult expert is detrimental to creativity in children but 2) beneficial in adolescence, while 3) it has no effect on late adolescents. The present study is the first to provide evidence that social evaluation by an adult has an opposite effect on creative idea generation in children and adolescents, and offers new directions to investigate social influences on creativity from a developmental perspective.