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Education and media services both provide services that embody local cultures, in which there is extensive public sector participation and significant domestic regulation. At the same time, they are dramatically affected by the information and communication technology revolution. The production of information content now involves huge costs in terms of research and development or artistic talent, while the cost of making such products available to other consumers is very low. This in turn challenges the effectiveness of domestic regulation and raises fundamental questions about its purpose, calling for an increased scope for international trade and investment, and the development of supply chains. This book provides readers with a comprehensive and consistent treatment of policy in the higher education and media services sector across a range of Asian economies little studied in the existing literature. It gives an overview of global trends in each area, followed by detailed, country-specific studies. Through comparative work, it identifies common elements across these sectors and highlights critical implications for trade policy.
How can countries prepare teachers to face the diverse challenges in today’s schools? The OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) helps answer this question by asking teachers and school leaders about their working conditions and the learning environments at their schools. TALIS aims to provide valid, timely and comparable information to help countries review and define policies for developing a high-quality teaching profession. It is an opportunity for teachers and school leaders to provide input into educational policy analysis and development in key areas. This report presents the results of the second cycle of the TALIS survey conducted in 2013.
Higher level vocational education and training (VET) programmes are facing rapid change and intensifying challenges. What type of training is needed to meet the needs of changing economies? How should the programmes be funded? How should they be linked to academic and university programmes? How can employers and unions be engaged? This report synthesises the findings of the series of country reports done on skills beyond school.
This report evaluates the education reform agenda of Kazakhstan – its feasibility and focus – by taking stock of present-day strengths and weaknesses of the secondary education system. The report also provides guidance on adjusting the reform implementation plans in line with international experiences and best practices regarding educational change, and consolidates much of the previously dispersed (national) data on primary and secondary schools in Kazakhstan into a common analytical base of evidence, validated by the education authorities.
Chapter 1 of this report provides an overview of the country, it education system and reform plans. Subsequent chapters provide analysis of and recommendations on equity and effectiveness of schooling; assessment and evaluation practices; policies for teachers and principals; expenditure patterns and financing mechanisms; vocational education and training; and a summary of the recommendations.
This first volume of PISA 2012 results summarises the performance of students in PISA 2012. It describes how performance is defined, measured and reported, and then provides results from the assessment, showing what students are able to do in mathematics. After a summary of mathematics performance, it examines the ways in which this performance varies on subscales representing different aspects of mathematics literacy. Given that any comparison of the outcomes of education systems needs to take into consideration countries’ social and economic circumstances, and the resources they devote to education, the volume also presents the results within countries’ economic and social contexts. In addition, the volume examines the relationship between the frequency and intensity of students’ exposure to subject content in school, what is known as “opportunity to learn”, and student performance. The volume concludes with a description of student results in reading and science. Trends in student performance in mathematics between 2003 and 2012, in reading between 2000 and 2012, and in science between 2006 and 2012 are examined when comparable data are available. Throughout the volume, case studies examine in greater detail the policy reforms adopted by countries that have improved in PISA.
This sixth volume of PISA 2012 results examines 15-year-old students’ performance in financial literacy in the 18 countries and economies that participated in this optional assessment. It also discusses the relationship of financial literacy to students’ and their families’ background and to students’ mathematics and reading skills. The volume also explores students’ access to money and their experience with financial matters. In addition, it provides an overview of the current status of financial education in schools and highlights relevant case studies.
This fifth volume of PISA 2012 results presents an assessment of student performance in problem solving, which measures students’ capacity to respond to non-routine situations in order to achieve their potential as constructive and reflective citizens. It provides the rationale for assessing problem-solving skills and describes performance within and across countries and economies. In addition, the volume highlights the relative strengths and weaknesses of each school system and examines how they are related to individual student characteristics, such as gender, immigrant background and socio-economic status. The volume also explores the role of education in fostering problem-solving skills.
Skills are central to Norway’s future prosperity and the well-being of its people. This diagnostic report identifies 12 skills challenges for Norway which were distilled from a series of interactive diagnostic workshops held in the course of 2013 with a wide range of stakeholders in Oslo, Buskerud County and Nordland County.
The OECD Skills Strategy Diagnostic Report: Norway draws upon a wide range of OECD comparative data and analysis to illustrate each skills challenge and offers insights from the experience of other countries in tackling similar skills challenges. The first nine skills challenges refer to specific outcomes across the three pillars of developing, activating and using skills. The last three skills challenges refer to the “enabling” conditions which strengthen the overall skills system.
Skills are central to Austria’s future prosperity and the well-being of its people. The OECD Skills Strategy Diagnostic Report: Austria identifies 14 skills challenges for Austria. The project and this report build on both the insights from workshops as well as latest international comparative analysis from OECD and national sources. The report provides cases illustrating how other countries have tackled similar challenges, which can be used as input to potential policy options on how to tackle these challenges. The challenges are described under each of the main pillars of the OECD Skills Strategy. The first 11 challenges refer to specific outcomes across the three pillars of developing, activating and using skills. The next three challenges refer to the “enabling” conditions which strengthen the overall skills system. Success in tackling these skills challenges will boost performance across the whole skills system.
This book provides, from an international perspective, an independent analysis of major issues facing the educational evaluation and assessment framework, current policy initiatives, and possible future approaches in the Slovak Republic.
This book finds that, in many ways, Northern Ireland stands out internationally with its thoughtfully designed evaluation and assessment framework. The major components are well developed, in particular policies for student assessment, school evaluation and school system evaluation. It has been developed using the majority of key design principles recommended by the OECD. The approach to evaluation and assessment combines: central control over policy development and standard setting; transparency over procedures and reporting of results; an increasing responsibility for the implementation of evaluation and assessment among teachers and schools; and central mechanisms to monitor the effectiveness of implementation. For example, while schools and their Boards of Governors are accountable for their educational quality and are accountable to their communities, school development planning processes are also monitored as part of external school evaluation by a central inspectorate. Teachers play a central role in student assessment and their assessment of pupil progress against central standards is moderated by a central agency which engages working teachers in the process. Teachers in primary schools are offered central diagnostic tests to support their assessment of pupil progress. Only teacher appraisal remains entirely school based, but there is a set of common competence standards for teachers.
How can student assessment, teacher appraisal, school evaluation and system evaluation bring about real gains in performance across a country’s school system? This review report for the Netherlands provides, from an international perspective, an independent analysis of major issues facing the Dutch evaluation and assessment framework in education, current policy initiatives and possible future approaches. This series forms part of the OECD Review on Evaluation and Assessment Frameworks for Improving School Outcomes.
The Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) asks teachers and principals who they are, where they teach and how they feel about their work. The results on lower secondary schools were published in TALIS 2013 Results: An International Perspective on Teaching and Learning. A few countries chose to also conduct the survey in primary and/or upper secondary education. This report presents the results of these options and offers a broader view of teachers and school principals across all levels of compulsory education, and all the similarities and differences in the issues they are facing.
Do teachers innovate? Do they try different pedagogical approaches? Are practices within classrooms and educational organisations changing? And to what extent can change be linked to improvements? A measurement agenda is essential to an innovation and improvement strategy in education. Measuring Innovation in Educationoffers new perspectives on addressing the need for such measurement.
This book’s first objective is informative: it gives readers new international comparative information about innovation in education compared to other sectors. And it documents change in a variety of dimensions of school practices between 1999 and 2011. Its second objective is methodological: it assesses two approaches to capturing the extent and type of innovation occurring within and across education systems. The third objective is exploratory: this book showcases a large-scale pilot that presents over 200 measures of innovation in education using existing international data. Last but not least, the fourth objective is prospective: this report proposes new approaches to measuring innovation in education in the future.
This book is the beginning of a new journey: it calls for innovations in the field of measurement – and not just of education.
The story of Korean education over the past 50 years is one of remarkable growth and achievement. Korea is one of the top performing countries in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) survey and among those with the highest proportion of young people who have completed upper secondary and tertiary education. Korea is continuously exploring ways to improve its education system and has dramatically increased government investment in education over the last decade. Nevertheless, further reforms are needed to spur and sustain improvements. Rapid globalisation and modernisation are also posing new and demanding challenges to equip young people of today and tomorrow with skills relevant to the 21st century.
The report Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education: Lessons from PISA for Korea aims at helping Korea to identify and address education policy challenges in an international perspective. To this end, it examines the Korean education system through the prism of PISA, considers recent policy developments and suggests specific policy options to foster improvements. The report also provides an in-depth analysis of the experience of other high-performing countries.
The importance of financial literacy and specifically the need to promote financial education has been recognised as an important contributor to improved financial inclusion and individuals’ financial well-being as well as a support to financial stability. The relevance of financial education policies is acknowledged at the highest global policy level: in 2012, G20 Leaders endorsed the OECD/INFE High-level Principles on National Strategies for Financial Education that specifically identify youth as one of the priority targets of government policies in this domain. That same year, Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Ministers of Finance identified financial literacy as a critical life skill.
The publication addresses the challenges linked to the introduction of financial education in schools, and provides practical guidance and case studies to assist policy makers, and a comparative analysis of existing learning frameworks for financial education in the formal school system.
Excellence in education without equity risks leading to large economic and social disparities; equity in education at the expense of quality is a meaningless aspiration. The most advanced education systems now set ambitious goals for all students, focusing on both excellence and equity. They also equip their teachers with the pedagogic skills that have been proven effective and with enough autonomy so that teachers can use their own creativity in determining the content and instruction they provide to their individual students.
The fourth International Summit on the Teaching Profession brought together education ministers, union leaders and other teacher leaders from high-performing and rapidly improving education systems, as measured by PISA (the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment ). Their aim was to discuss equity, excellence and inclusiveness in education by exploring three questions:
• How are high-quality teachers developed, and how do schools with the greatest need attract and retain them?
• How can equity be ensured in increasingly devolved education systems? and
• What kinds of learning environments address the needs of all students?
To underpin the discussions, this publication identifies some of the steps policy makers can take to build school systems that are both equitable and excellent. The analysis is complemented with examples that illustrate proven or promising practices in specific countries.
Education at a Glance 2014: Highlights summarises the OECD’s flagship compendium of education statistics, Education at a Glance. It provides easily accessible data on key topics in education today, including:
• Education levels and student numbers: How far have adults studied, and how does early childhood education affect student performance later on?
• Higher education and work: How many young people graduate from tertiary education, and how easily do they enter the world of work?
• Economic and social benefits of education: How does education affect people’s job prospects, and what is its impact on incomes?
• Paying for education: What share of public spending goes on education, and what is the role of private spending?
• The school environment: How many hours do teachers work, and how does class size vary?
Each indicator is presented on a two-page spread. The left-hand page explains the significance of the indicator, discusses the main findings, examines key trends and provides readers with a roadmap for finding out more in the OECD education databases and in other OECD education publications. The right-hand page contains clearly presented charts and tables, accompanied by dynamic hyperlinks (StatLinks) that direct readers to the corresponding data in Excel™ format.
Education at a Glance: OECD Indicators is the authoritative source for accurate and relevant information on the state of education around the world. It provides data on the structure, finances, and performance of education systems in the OECD’s 34 member countries, as well as a number of partner countries.
In the 2014 edition, new material includes:
• Data from the Survey of Adult Skills, a product of the OECD Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), on attainment, employment, intergenerational education mobility, earnings, and social outcomes related to skills proficiency.
• New indicators on private institutions, on what it takes to become a teacher, and on the availability of, and participation in, professional development activities for teachers.
• Data from the 2013 OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) in several indicators.
• Analysis of the impact of the recent economic crisis on the interplay among educational attainment, employment, earnings and public finance.
• More in-depth information related to upper secondary completion rates.
• A detailed examination of the types and use of student loans.
• For the first time, data from Colombia and Latvia.
The Excel™ spreadsheets used to create the tables and charts in Education at a Glance are available via the StatLinks provided throughout. The tables and charts, as well as the complete OECD Online Education Database, are freely available via the OECD Education website at www.oecd.org/edu/eag.htm . A data update released in January 2015 is available at http://data.oecd.org/chart/4eJL.
How can mathematics education foster the skills that are appropriate for innovative societies? Mathematics education is heavily emphasised worldwide, nevertheless it is still considered to be a stumbling block for many students. While there is almost a consensus that mathematics problems appropriate for the 21st century should be complex, unfamiliar and non-routine (CUN), most of the textbooks still mainly include routine problems based on the application of ready-made algorithms.
The time has come to introduce innovative instructional methods in order to enhance mathematics education and students’ ability to solve CUN tasks. Metacognitive pedagogies can play a key role in this. These pedagogies explicitly train students to “think about their thinking” during learning. They can be used to improve not just academic achievement (content knowledge and understanding, the ability to handle unfamiliar problems etc.) but also affective outcomes such as reduced anxiety or improved motivation. This strong relationship between metacognition and schooling outcomes has implications for the education community and policy makers.
This book is designed to assist practitioners, curriculum developers and policy makers alike in preparing today’s students for tomorrow’s world.