Self-Assessment of Teamwork Skills Among Adolescents: Psychometric Properties of the Collaborative Skills Scale

Monitoring the development of increasingly essential collaborative skills at the individual level within a classroom context requires effective, easy-to-use, and quick measurement tools. These tools should provide global feedback on the skillset rather than reflecting performance in a single group task. A self-rated questionnaire is a beneficial option for this purpose. The aim of our research is to develop a self-rated scale for adolescents, the Collaborative Skills Scale (CoSS), which provides a global assessment of students’ teamwork competence. Additionally, using our assessment instrument, we seek to explore what patterns adolescents’ self-ratings show to be connected to their collaborative skills. A total of 2128 Grade 8 students participated in our online data collection. The Collaborative Skills Scale was developed based on the collaborative problem-solving model of the ATC21S project. Confirmatory factor analyses yielded a reliable and structurally valid 18-item scale (Cronbach’s α = 0.90; χ² = 1802.83, df = 132, p < 0.01; CFI = 0.944; TLI = 0.935; RMSEA = 0.077; SRMR = 0.031), which can provide educational practitioners with an effective formative assessment tool for monitoring and supporting the development of teamwork skills. Ideally, it should be utilized in combination with other instruments, such as peer- or teacher-rated scales, to ensure a comprehensive understanding of students’ collaborative skills. In line with previous findings, students tended to rate their teamwork skills above average. The implications of this potentially biased self-evaluation among adolescents in terms of collaborative competence are discussed.