New styles of instruction Globalization, economic necessity, and low civic engagement compound the urgency for students to develop the skills and knowledge they need for success. The interconnectedness of our global economy, ecosystem, and political networks require that students learn to communicate, collaborate, and problem solve with people worldwide. Employers demand fewer people with basic skill sets and more people with complex thinking and communication skills (Levy & Murnane, 2005). Low levels of civic engagement highlight the recognition that rote learning about government is not a suffi cient way for students to learn how and why to be engaged citizens (Levine, 2012). But the movement toward 21st-century skillsas any movement-must defi ne its objective, to wit, the skills that comprise the movement. Based on several hundred interviews with business, nonprofi t, and education leaders, Tony Wagner (2008) Learning 21st-century skills requires 21st-century teaching ANNA ROSEFSKY SAAVEDRA

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Are today’s students able to discern quality information from sham online? In the largest investigation of its kind, we administered an assessment to 3,446 high school students. Equipped with a live internet connection, the students responded to six constructed-response tasks. The students struggled on all of them. Asked to investigate a site claiming to “disseminate factual reports” on climate science, 96% never learned about the organization’s ties to the fossil fuel industry. Two thirds were unable to distinguish news stories from ads on a popular website’s home page. More than half believed that an anonymously posted Facebook video, shot in Russia, provided “strong evidence” of U.S. voter fraud. Instead of investigating the organization or group behind a site, students were often duped by weak signs of credibility: a website’s “look,” its top-level domain, the content on its About page, and the sheer quantity of information it provided. The study’s sample reflected the demographic profile of high school students in the United States, and a multilevel regression model explored whether scores varied by student characteristics. Findings revealed differences in student abilities by grade level, self-reported grades, locality, socioeconomic status, race, maternal education, and free/reduced-price lunch status. Taken together, these findings reveal an urgent need to prepare students to thrive in a world in which information flows ceaselessly across their screens.

We use data collected between April 2020 and March 2021 from the Understanding America Survey, a nationally representative internet panel of approximately 1,450 households with school-age children, to document the access of American households to K–12 education during the COVID-19 crisis. We also explore disparities by parent race/ethnicity, income, urbanicity, partisanship, and grade level (i.e., elementary school vs. middle/high school). Results shed light on the vectors of inequality that occurred throughout the pandemic in access to technology, instruction, services (e.g., free and reduced-price meals), and in-person learning opportunities. Our work highlights the equity implications of the pandemic and suggests the importance of encouraging widespread in-person learning opportunities and attendance by the beginning of the 2021–2022 school year for addressing COVID-19’s educational effects.

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Prepared for the Office of the Secretary of DefenseApproved for public release; distribution unlimited NATIONAL DEFENSE RESEARCH INSTITUTE Limited Print and Electronic Distribution RightsThis document and trademark(s) contained herein are protected by law. This representation of RAND intellectual property is provided for noncommercial use only. Unauthorized posting of this publication online is prohibited. Permission is given to duplicate this document for personal use only, as long as it is unaltered and complete. Permission is required from RAND to reproduce, or reuse in another form, any of its research documents for commercial use. For information on reprint and linking permissions, please visit www.rand.org/pubs/permissions.html.The RAND Corporation is a research organization that develops solutions to public policy challenges to help make communities throughout the world safer and more secure, healthier and more prosperous. RAND is nonprofit, nonpartisan, and committed to the public interest.RAND's publications do not necessarily reflect the opinions of its research clients and sponsors.Support RAND Make a tax-deductible charitable contribution at www.rand.org/giving/contribute www.rand.org For more information on this publication, visit www.rand.org/t/TL160-1Published by the RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, Calif. © Copyright 2017 RAND CorporationR® is a registered trademark.iii PrefaceVeterans have a great deal to offer to potential civilian employers, including valuable nontechnical skills, such as leadership, decisionmaking, being dependable, and attention to detail. However, for civilian employers, understanding the nontechnical skills veterans have developed through military training, education, and on-the-job experience can be challenging, because military and civilian workplace cultures and languages can seem radically different from one another. To help address this issue, the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness asked the RAND Corporation to develop prototype tools to translate the valued nontechnical skills that enlisted personnel acquire during military service into civilian terms. This report documents one of the prototype tools, a prototype toolkit for use by civilian employers.In this toolkit, we describe how 19 general skills, important to civilian job success, are developed through on-the-job experience and selected formal military education courses for enlisted personnel in the Army and Marine Corps in selected combat arms occupations. The methodology used to develop the prototype toolkit is detailed in a separate report (available at www.rand.org/t/RR1919). Further, a high-level summary of this toolkit for employers is also available in a separate handout (www.rand.org/t/TL160z5).This prototype toolkit is intended as a packet of materials that can help employers better understand the important general civilian job-related skills that veterans may develop through on-the-job experience and formal courses. The packet begins with a letter from the Office of the...