The shortage of certified Career and Technical Education teachers in Hawaii impacts middle school students’ learning and acquisition of 21st Century skills. These skills are exceedingly necessary to enter the workforce or higher education. To address this problem, this project designed and evaluated an online learning module to help parents and guardians of middle school students help their child learn about the “4Cs”: communication, collaboration, creativity, and critical thinking. The ARCS model was used to guide the design of the learning module and its content delivery. Each lesson of the module contained activities where parents and guardians shared their experiences related to the 4Cs. From there, The module asks parents and guardians to share the information with their children, collecting their feedback for an e-portfolio. To evaluate the online module, 15 (n = 15) parents and guardians used the learning materials for one week. The participants took a pre-survey and a post-survey in order to evaluate the four lessons. Data collected indicated that the participants were satisfied with the content and motivated to help their child learn the 4Cs. There were some flaws in the design of the module which can be fixed through further revisions. As a whole, the project was a success supporting parents’ efforts to build their children’s 21st Century skills.
Maeva Anderson