Development of Soft Skills via IYPT

TL;DR

This study explores how participation in the International Young Physicists' Tournament (IYPT) influences students' soft skills development, combining student perceptions, teacher assessments, and expert evaluations of research performance.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis linking inquiry-based learning in IYPT to soft skills development and student performance, offering thirteen practical guidelines.

Findings

Students perceive IYPT as beneficial for soft skills development.

Teacher assessments align with student perceptions of soft skills growth.

Research performance correlates with soft skills development.

Abstract

We investigated how students perceive the role of IYPT (www.iypt.org) participation in their development of soft skills. We also investigated how students teachers assess the contribution of YPT participation to students soft skills development. Third, we link self-reported soft-skill development to performance in research tasks, as assessed by international panels of experts in the context of a physics competition. Taken together, the three steps, by triangulating the relationship between inquiry-based learning and soft-skill development, allow building inference about how inquiry-based learning helps students build soft skills, and how these soft skills influence student performance in research tasks. The data for the three stages includes 308 student responses for stage one, 33 teacher responses for stage two, and 794 expert (teachers, researchers, and university professors) assessments of student performance for stage three. Condensing the detailed findings from our analysis, we suggest thirteen guidelines for developing soft skills in students below.