A study on awareness of life skills among post graduate students

Life skills are the abilities enabling an individual for an adaptive behaviour to fulfil the needs and demands of life so that they face the challenges effectively in life. Life skills inculcate healthy, positive and productive progress of an individual for and they establish moral and ethical maturity and enhance the psycho-social skills. Life skills have become the salt and pepper of all individuals related to all aspects of life. Within education, the impact of life skills has become the essence of teaching and learning process. The present study aims on assessing the life skills awareness among post graduates with respect to some of the demographic variables. In the present descriptive and quantitative study, total 100 students were selected in which 50 male students (25 Arts and 25 Science) and 50 female students (25 Arts and 25 Science) were identified from various departments of Central University of Kerala, Kasaragod. Normative survey research method was used for the study. Tool in questionnaire form on life skills awareness for 100 post graduates comprised of 50 questions were prepared focussing on five dimensions of life skills i.e. problem solving, decision making, empathy, effective communication and coping with stress, trauma and loss. The tool was standardised by item analysis in which 33 questions were retained from the preliminary draft of 50 items for data collection. The present study revealed that there is no significant difference in life skills awareness of post graduates with respect to gender, age, family type, subjects or streams, and marital status. The applications of life skills in education will lend automatically a student-centred school environment in the 21st century. The present paper shows the role and impact of life skills in transforming teaching and learning pedagogy by seeking for the exploration in the awareness of life skills among post graduate students for the effectiveness in teaching learning process.