Cognitive and Non-Cognitive Processing in Future-Focused Learning (FFL)

Dear Colleagues,

A concept of “21st century skills” was coined at the turn of the 21st century, by business sectors with a belief that the types of skills and knoweldge that are necessary to enhance workforce readiness for future generations would differ from those of the previous years. The idea of 21st century skills quickly spread to education sectors, who then embraced the challenge of identifying major characteristics and attributes of “successful” individuals in the new era. It was based on a view that traditional skills, knowledge, and even intelligence that are firmly rooted in 3Rs, i.e., reading, writing, and arithmatics, would take less importance in development of future societies. There was a sense of urgency to define, understand, and teach young generations according to a new learning and cognitive model that can illustrate how to secure academic and economic success. Soft skills such as collaboration, time management, enthusiasm, perseverance, open-mindedness, self-monitoring and self-awareness were advocated, while other skills that are more closely related to cognitive abilities such as  metacognition, creativity, critical thinking and collective problem-solving skills became more welcome than ever.

Moving forward, we are now into almost 20 years of the 21st century. In recognizing the renewed dedication to the understanding of the desired skill sets of future generations, another new term, “future-focused learning (FFL)”, has been coined. While the FFL concept has not been formally defined as yet, it can be assumed that it should start by critically reviewing whether academia and business sectors have successfully identified the “21st century skills” to satisfy the needs of economic and educational growth.

It is understood that the main components of FFL include the focus on learning process, emphasis on cultural context of learning, and tackling automatization issues and the need to adapt to rapidly changing technology-infused environments. Meanwhile, the emphasis on complex problems, real-world application, creativity, critical thinking, personalized learning, and practice of learning and teaching by units that combine multiple subjects (e.g., a subject called STEAM which is Arts-infused STEM subjects) continues to be relevant for FFL.

Under the broad theme of future-focused learning (FFL), we invite submissions that address either one or more than one of the following issues:

(1)   Critical review of the 21^st century skills in relationship to cognitive and non-cognitive processing

(2)   New concept/construct development for the future-focused learning (FFL) that would impact education, economic growth and social structures

(3)   Future-focused learning (FFL) in relationship to intelligence

Both review papers and empirical papers will be welcome.

Prof. Dr. Jihyun Lee
Prof. Dr. Lazar Stankov
Guest Editors

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• future-focused learning (FFL)
• 21st century skills
• 21st century learning
• soft skills
• collaborative learning
• time management
• self-monitoring and self-awareness
• metacognition
• creativity
• collective problem-solving skills
• critical thinking skills
• cross-subject learning