A modern tool for middle school and 10th-grade students is available from the Ministry of Education, Religious Affairs, and Sports, with the aim of developing their skills in mathematics, science, and reading.

This is the Skills4Life Question Bank, which was developed in collaboration with the University of Ioannina and includes questions that emphasize the application of academic knowledge to address practical issues and the demands of everyday life.

In this way, the Question Bank helps:

• students become familiar with such topics, in order to strengthen their basic literacy skills. This is a new philosophy of learning, which is largely incorporated into the new curricula and is being evaluated in a series of international studies
• teachers to have access to topics along these lines, so that they can incorporate them into their teaching
• the school community become familiar with problem-solving and responding to problems in a digital environment.

The Bank already has 240 graded-difficulty questions, which include more than 800 items. The questions cover a wide range of topics and include multiple-choice, short-answer, and mixed-format questions. Many questions are presented in an interactive environment and are based on simulations (particularly in science and mathematics). For each question included in the test, feedback is provided both on what the correct answer is and on why another suggested answer is not acceptable. In this way, teachers can develop strategies for addressing their students’ mistakes.

The Bank’s interface is specially designed to be user-friendly and easy to use, allowing users to rate the quality of each topic and create topics of their choice in their personal folder. For each topic, a complete set of metadata is available (e.g., skill being assessed, area of application, difficulty level), which also serve as search criteria for topics in the Bank.

The development of the Skills4Life Question Bank is part of the Ministry of Education, Religious Affairs and Sports’ overall strategy to improve the educational process and foster core skills that are assessed internationally. This initiative aims to connect what students learn in school with real-world problems, thereby fostering reflection, critical thinking, and the use of digital tools in learning.

The Bank is constantly being developed and expanded, and is open to everyone (teachers, parents, students) at https://skills4life.gr/ and is offered free of charge—especially for students in the 3rd year of middle school and the 1st year of high school.