To be honest, one thing that kinda bugs me in this paper is how they make transversal skills sound pretty clear and well-defined, but then at the same time they admit that the frameworks around them are all over the place. Like, they try to group the skills into these four categories, cognitive, social-emotional, well-being, and citizenship, but honestly in real life most of these skills are super overlapping or shift around depending on the context. They sort of just skip over that messiness like it’s not a big deal, which I think it is.
Another thing is, they go on about how transversal skills are super important for society and future jobs and all, but like, they don’t really show enough hard evidence to support all that. I mean, where’s the real data? No strong cross-cultural studies or long-term tracking that shows these skills actually improve outcomes. So some parts felt more like educated guessing than conclusions from actual results.
This paper attempts to bring much-needed clarity to the fragmented field of transversal skills, but its methodological approach fundamentally undermines its own conclusions. The authors openly admit that their review of frameworks is not systematic and is potentially non-exhaustive, selectively focusing on “well-known organizations.”
This is a critical flaw. By not employing a systematic, transparent, and reproducible methodology for framework selection, the entire categorization exercise, the core of the paper’s first aim—becomes an arbitrary and biased construction. It appears the authors started with a predetermined four-category model (cognitive, citizenship, well-being, social-emotional) and then populated it by cherry-picking from frameworks that fit this mold, while ignoring the true dissonance and overlap in the literature.
This explains why the resulting taxonomy feels artificially neat and fails to grapple with the “messiness” that the commenter rightly identified. The paper sidesteps the very conceptual chaos it sets out to address because its methodology is designed to produce a clean, publishable framework rather than to genuinely synthesize a complex field. Consequently, the proposed structure is more reflective of the authors’ subjective grouping than a robust, evidence-based model derived from a comprehensive analysis. This foundational weakness calls into question the validity and utility of the entire paper, making its recommendations for practice and research agenda built on shaky ground.