Working to change the mindset for math

by Marilyn Achiron
Editor, Directorate for Education and Skills

What is it about math that strikes fear and trembling in students and adults alike? Perhaps the fault is not in the math, but in ourselves – in how we teach and learn it. Jo Boaler certainly thinks so. She calls mathematics literacy the issue of the 21st century. Even as more companies are looking for people who can use advanced reasoning skills to solve problems, students spend most of their time in math class learning how to compute, she says. Boaler, a British-born professor of mathematics education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education and author of several books on teaching and learning mathematics, brings the latest thinking in psychology, particularly the work of Carol Dweck, and neuroscience to bear on her argument that students would be better served if teachers took a multi-dimensional approach to math (including problem solving, reasoning and communicating) rather than a one-dimensional approach (teaching how to perform various mathematical processes). Indeed, given the emerging evidence she cites of how the former type of teaching results in high student performance, “it’s a no-brainer”, she says.

But the brain, itself, provides some of the all-important evidence for advocating multi-dimensional learning of mathematics. “With recent findings about brain plasticity, we are learning that the brain is more flexible than once thought; and that brain structure changes after training,” Boaler said during a recent visit to OECD headquarters in Paris. “That means that all students can achieve.” Not only that, she says: brain activity increases when students make mistakes in the process of learning: “When you make a mistake, your synapses fire; this doesn’t happen when you get the answer right,” Boaler noted.  “Mistakes are the most useful thing a kid can make.”

So, if the evidence is so concrete and overwhelming, why aren’t we seeing wholesale changes in the way mathematics is taught and learned? “Kids who do well on procedural tests might not do as well on different kinds of problems,” Boaler said. “Teachers and parents don’t know the evidence; it’s a communication issue as well. And some of the problem is about ‘who should achieve’: some people don’t have equity in mind.”

It comes down to teachers’ attitudes, too. “Some teachers embrace change, some are much more conservative about change,” Boaler said. She finds a “huge willingness” among elementary and middle school teachers in the United States to alter the way they teach mathematics, and more resistance among high school teachers. “Good math teaching is good teaching,” she said. Right now, “math is taught as a ‘right or wrong’ subject, which conveys the message that either you can or you can’t do it. This is a stereotyped message about who can achieve; and it has all the ingredients for failure and inequity -- which is what you see in mathematics performance. A lot has to do with beliefs among teachers. One belief that the best teachers have is that all of their students can achieve.”

Change is happening, albeit slowly. In the United States, for example, the new Common Core curriculum puts greater emphasis on problem solving. (Results from the PISA 2012 assessment of problem solving will be released on 1 April.) “People are seeing results of problem-solving tests and they are freaking out,” Boaler said. “Industry wants change. Mathematics performance has to do with confidence: if students feel they can’t do it, that’s a huge barrier; it’s a damaging mindset to have, for both high- and low-performing students. But when you promote learning as a process, great things happen. ”

Boaler has started a movement to change the way math is taught in schools, which can be seen at www.youcubed.org.

Links:
Jo Boaler
Stanford Graduate School of Education
What's Math Got to do With It? written by Jo Boaler
Carol Dweck
Common Core
Results from PISA 2012
Photo Credit: Concept illustration of a human brain made from crumpled paper with numbers and equations on it / @Shutterstock

Expanding PISA’s circle of influence

by Barbara Ischinger, Director, OECD Directorate for Education and Skills
and Alejandro Gomez Palma, Analyst, PISA for Development

The enormous worldwide interest in the PISA 2012 results, which were released last December, showed that PISA is now widely accepted as the best measure of student performance we have – and one of the best sources of data that can be used to inform policy decisions about how to improve education systems. Sixty-five countries and economies participated in PISA 2012, but that leaves well over 100 others that either chose not to or believe that participation is out of their reach. We hope that that’s going to change soon.

We’ve just returned from Ecuador where the government agreed – with a sense of pride that was palpable – to participate in our pilot PISA for Development initiative. Eight Latin American countries participated in the latest round of PISA 2012 and we’re keen to add to that number. We’ve briefly mentioned the PISA for Development project in earlier blogs, but now that countries are signing on, we want to describe in more detail what it is and what it means, both for the OECD and for the countries involved.

The OECD has already done a lot of work on development issues (among other things, we helped to define the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, for example). We have often been asked to conduct reviews of education systems in developing countries and emerging economies; but because we haven’t always had a good evidence base for these countries, we didn’t feel we could provide the kind of analysis they were looking for.

In many of these countries, the main obstacle to conducting such reviews is the absence of good data. There is hardly any information at all on education outcomes, including results of student assessments or the level of quality and equity of the education provided. While some assessments and evaluations of education are conducted at the regional level in many areas, including Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa, and we have been working with – and learning from – the organisers of these assessments as we shape PISA for Development, they cannot offer the kind of global benchmarking that PISA can.

The data PISA elicits is not just used to develop “league tables” comparing countries’ performance; it can – and should – be used as a public policy tool: governments can release the information to inform a public debate on how to improve the quality of their education systems.

A lot of what we will be doing in PISA for Development is building capacity in participating countries for managing large-scale student assessments. For the countries participating, our aim is to bring the level of capacity up to the minimum level needed to implement PISA.  In fact, many developing countries that have already participated in PISA have said that one of the biggest benefits has been the attendant capacity-building that is part of PISA.

The PISA for Development project fits in nicely with work on the post-2015 agenda, the successor framework to the Millennium Development Goals, which are likely to focus on ensuring access to education plus improving the quality of education, particularly the quality and equity of learning outcomes. How is the developing world going to measure quality in education? Well, the OECD and the over 70 countries that have participated in PISA since the first round in 2000 would respond that we already have a proven instrument: PISA. What we need to do now is to modify the assessment so that it can be used by a far larger set of countries that have a wider spectrum of student performance.

We’ll tell you how we’re adapting the PISA instruments, methods and analyses for PISA for Development – and targeting countries in sub-Saharan Africa, too, none of which has ever participated in PISA – in a subsequent blog.

Links:
PISA 2012 results
PISA for Development
United Nations Millennium Development Goals
Latin American Laboratory for Assessment of the Quality of Education (LLECE)
CONFEMEN Programme for the Analysis of Education Systems (PASEC)
The Southern and Eastern Africa Consortium for Monitoring Educational Quality (SACMEQ)
Photo Credit: INEVAL/Ecuador

Inclusive educational innovations in India

by Stéphan Vincent-Lancrin and Alfonso Echazarra
CERI Innovation Strategy, Directorate for Education and Skills


India has been hailed for being a laboratory of frugal and inclusive innovations. The Tata Nano, the cheapest car in the world, the Aravind Eye Care Hospitals, which fight “avoidable blindness” by giving cheap or free state-of-the-art eye surgery to poor Indians, or the Bharti Airtel, which offers low-rate phone calls, thanks to an innovative business model, are often-cited examples of innovations that make valuable products and services affordable to deprived populations. Just glance at the Honey Bee Network database and you will find a plethora of interesting initiatives targeted to the Indian poor: from the Mitticool, a natural refrigerator made entirely from clay that requires no energy, to the Washing and Exercise Machine, a mechanical, semi-automated, pedal operated washing machine for clothes, the jugaad spirit is ubiquitous.

This drive for inclusive innovation is visible across all sectors in India, and education is no exception. The spotlight has often fallen on the USD 35 Aakash tablet, designed to improve the teaching process and end the digital divide, and on the Mid-Day Meal programme, a government programme that provides free hot lunches for children attending school. But there are also plenty of other initiatives trying to improve the educational outcomes of the economically deprived. These initiatives are particularly welcome in a country where, in spite of remarkable progress in education, one third of the adult population remains illiterate (EFA report 2012) and improving learning outcomes remains a huge challenge, as evidenced by Pratham’s Aser report, itself another example of frugal innovation.

The Education Innovation Fund for India (EIFI), the first competitive fund for educational innovation across India and a collaboration between Hewlett Packard and the India Council for Integral Education (Sri Aurobindo Society), funds and supports about 20 initiatives addressing such challenges. As part of new work on inclusive innovation in education started by the OECD Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI), EIFI grantees have piloted our new survey and shared with us how they help poor students access better quality education. Here are a few examples of innovations they are implementing.

One reason why low income students frequently have low learning outcomes is that they are offered an education that is irrelevant to their interests and daily life. Oasis, a social innovation organisation, notes that rural children are often trained for urban professions, while schools offering good programmes in rural development are located in urban areas. As a result, neither rural nor urban kids tend to use their knowledge, notwithstanding the fact that they are very likely to have dropped out long before they complete their education. The establishment of Gramodaya schools in rural areas is meant to address this mismatch. The schools will offer rural development education to rural students so that they can implement the practical knowledge and sustainable techniques that they will learn through peer-to-peer and community-based learning.

Another reason for low learning outcomes is that well-meaning teachers are often poorly equipped to provide good teaching, in terms of both pedagogical knowledge and resources. In deprived areas, pedagogical innovations will not be adopted unless they cost virtually nothing and are accompanied by some form of pedagogical aid for teachers. But several frugal innovations show that the cost of learning resources can be made almost irrelevant (though this does not imply there is no other challenge for their adoption).

Making better use of a school building may just require some good use of paint, as Building as Learning Aid (BaLA) by Vinyãs has shown. BaLA develops standards to turn school buildings into learning resources. Diagrams painted on the floors underneath doorways, for example, support children’s learning of angles. BaLA also maps its learning resources on the Indian curriculum, showing school principals and teachers how these new resources can be used in teaching and learning. The project now operates in 18 Indian states, affecting over 10,000 government schools and their communities.

Another programme, Learning is Fun and Experiential (LIFE) Lab provides low-cost, hands-on learning models to foster experiential science learning in underprivileged schools, hoping to boost students’ interest, confidence and creativity. The balloon car, used to teach Newton’s laws of motion, only requires a balloon, a straw, an ice cream stick and four bottle caps – not to mention, of course, a healthy dose of curiosity and craftsmanship. Science teachers across India can access the “LIFE Lab” as an open source platform of hundreds of resources by attending support sessions in its community centres. Life-lab is currently working with eight schools, two community centres and 3,000 children.

India is a laboratory of frugal and inclusive innovations. But how can these promising ideas and stories empower more teachers and students in their learning and be scaled up? Making these innovations visible and shared across school and teacher networks is the aim of two EIFI grantees, both making a simple use of technology to that effect.

By identifying Gujarati schools and teachers doing much better than expected, the Educational Innovation Bank at IIM Ahmedabad is building a repository of teaching innovations meant to empower and inspire other teachers looking for practical ideas to teach more effectively in India’s under-resourced schools. With a network of 4,000 innovative teachers, the web-based database already reaches out to 100,000 more.

Design for Change (DfC) proposes another way of making inspiring success stories visible. It shows that learners can be agents of change and be made more responsible for their learning and for changing their community. DfC supports teachers and learners in virtually all Indian states with a simple method based on design thinking. Drawing on the projects submitted to its school challenge, it displays its preferred ideas in a video database containing numerous inspiring “stories of change”. Design for Change now has sister organisations in 34 countries.

All of these examples show that making quality education accessible to poor students does not necessarily require many additional resources: it can just take a better use of existing resources, cheap additional ones, or the adoption of existing good ideas – generally with some form of teacher support. While frugal innovations alone may not be enough, Indian innovators show us that the jugaad spirit can improve the education of disadvantaged children at little cost.

Links:
CERI Innovation Strategy for Education and Training: Inclusive Innovation
CERI Innovation Strategy for Education and Training
OECD Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI)
OECD report on Innovation and Inclusive Growth

Hiroshima – from symbol of human destruction to leader in educational reform

by Andreas Schleicher
Deputy Director for Education and Skills and Special Advisor on Education Policy to the OECD's Secretary General

I spent two days in Hiroshima, discussing education reform and global policy trends with prefectural leaders and the academic community. This city, target of a simply unimaginable attack on human mankind 59 years ago, is now the birthplace of some of the World’s most innovative education policies and practices.

No building, no tree and no other remainder of human activity in this city is older than 59 years. As school principal Kadoshima drives by an office tower on our way to his school, he explains this had been the place where his grandmother and two uncles had been burned alive like most other residents of the area, leaving nothing but a shadow on the floor. But I am also told how many of the survivors left wandering between life and death for the ensuing months and years have envied their fate. His father and his uncle were the only ones who remained from the family, as they had happened to spend the 6th of August in 1945 with classmates in the country side.

As we arrive at Hiroshima Nagisa High School, we meet a group of cheerful children on the school’s playing field. But what looks like casual play is actually part of a carefully planned and sequenced curriculum designed to help students develop their five senses; to find themselves and join others in life, work and citizenship; and to develop autonomy and identity that is social and cognisant of pluralism.

Classroom after classroom I observe deep and intense learning with a curriculum characterised by rigor, focus and coherence, and with lots of lively interaction both among students and with their teachers. Mathematics and the arts are not seen here as competing for scarce student learning time, but as reinforcing each other. Much of the school’s effort is devoted to making learning central and encouraging student engagement, to foster lifelong skills-oriented learning instead of exams-focused drill, to ensure that learning is social and collaborative, and to promote connections across subjects and activities in the school. I find Rudyard Brettargh from Australia and Olen Peterson from the United States co-teaching an English class, and that again is not by accident, but the idea is to show students that there is not just a single, but multiple ways to speak a language.

Many of the school’s pedagogical approaches are designed to construct experiences in learning, over exclusively intellectual engagement. In one classroom I meet a group of students cooking Okonomiyaki, Hiroshima’s most popular local dish, but they are not all doing the same, each student is creating and preparing their own variant of the dish. Students experience that they won’t know exactly how things will unfold, that they will be surprised, and that they will make mistakes and learn from them along the way.

During these days, a group of students from the United States is visiting Nagisa High School and they have immediately immersed into all aspects of the school life. Likewise, Nagisa High School students frequently venture outside. Principal Kadoshima shows us pictures from the many field trips his student have taken to other countries and cultures, or simply to the world of work and other social contexts in Japan. The meaning of all this to prepare global citizens for a world in which most people will need to collaborate with people with diverse views, experiences and cultural origins; and a world in which people’s lives will be affected by events that transcend national boundaries, and the authority of national jurisdictions to address them. During these trips, students learn to engage with dilemmas and controversy that result from globalization which have no singular solution, but where awareness of different perspectives on these dilemmas is essential to finding the common ground necessary to solve them. They learn to understand the global economic, social and political environmental forces that shape our lives; and to develop the skills, attitudes and values which enable people to work together to bring about change and to take control of their own lives.

Not least, the school is stretching students not just intellectually but also physically. One picture shows an exhausted group of students lying on a bridge at dawn, after walking 44 kilometres through the night. The aim is to strengthen resilience, the capacity to cope in an imbalanced world, recognising that the world exists in constant disequilibrium - trying, failing, adapting, learning and evolving in endless cycles. And Nagisa High School shows that learning is at the centre of resilience. This is all about helping vulnerable people, organizations and systems persist, perhaps even thrive, amid unforeseeable disruptions. At the individual level, this can shape the reach of social networks, the quality of close relationships, access to resources, but also beliefs and habits of mind, including the disposition to assess, take and manage risks. At the aggregate level, it can support Japanese communities and institutions with greater flexibility, intelligence and responsiveness to the rapid economic and social changes which Japan is facing.

Links:
Hiroshima Nagisa High School
Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education Video
Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education - Lessons from PISA for Japan
PISA 2012 Country-Specific overview on Japan
Photo Credit: Hiroshima Nagisa High School

What do your parents do for a living? (and should it matter?)

by Marilyn Achiron
Editor, Directorate for Education and Skills

Does where you come from really tell you anything about where you’re going? When it comes to parents’ occupations and students’ performance, the answer is a qualified ‘yes’ – but it also depends on where, geographically, you go to school.

Intrigued? PISA is unveiling a web-based, interactive tool (occupations@pisa2012) that allows anyone to explore and compare the relationship between student performance in reading, mathematics and science and parents’ occupations in PISA-participating countries and economies.

The tool is based on results from PISA 2012. Among many other questions concerning students’ backgrounds, PISA asked participating students what their parents did for a living. Their responses were then coded into an internationally comparable classification that allows for identifying individuals working in similar industries, on similar tasks, with the same types of responsibilities. As this month’s PISA in Focus reveals, students whose parents work in professional occupations generally outperform other students in mathematics, while students whose parents work in elementary occupations tend to underachieve compared to their peers.

PISA shows that in the United States and the United Kingdom, where professionals are among the highest-paid in the world, students whose parents work as professionals do not perform as well in mathematics as children of professionals in other countries – nor do they perform as well as the children in Shanghai-China and Singapore whose parents work in manual occupations.

Results also show that, while France and New Zealand perform around the OECD average in mathematics, the performance gap between the children of skilled workers and those of unskilled workers is among the largest observed in participating countries and economies. By contrast, the relative high performance of Finland, Hong-Kong and Korea stems from the fact that the difference in mathematics performance between children of skilled and unskilled workers is relatively small. You’ll also see that Germany is not among PISA’s strongest performers overall because, while the children of professionals in Germany are among the world’s best performers in mathematics, students whose parents work in manual occupations perform very poorly, and these families make up a large share of the country’s total population.

This all boils down to a relatively simple message: if school systems want all of their students to succeed in school, they should give the children of factory workers and cleaners the same education opportunities that the children of doctors and lawyers enjoy.

Links:
Occupations@pisa2012
PISA 2012 Results
PISA in Focus No. 36: Do parents' occupations have an impact on student performance?
Photo Credit: Small Boy with Businessman Looking at Board with Mathematics Formulas / @Shutterstock

 

Skills will power Norway’s future prosperity

by Andreas Schleicher
Deputy Director for Education and Skills and Special Advisor on Education Policy to the OECD's Secretary General

While in Oslo last month, I caught a glimpse of what can be achieved when social partners and governments put skills at the top of their respective agendas. This year’s annual conference of Norway’s leading employer organisation was squarely focused on the “Learning Life” and in her opening address Prime Minister Solberg set the stage. “Oil has given Norway prosperity, but it is knowledge that is Norway’s future,” she said, “Jobs will increasingly be knowledge and skills intensive.” 

The fact that the Prime Minister stayed the entire day, joined by her Ministers and most of Norway’s business elite, underlines how determined the Norwegians are to make this happen. Today, we hope to contribute to achieving this vision with the OECD Skills Strategy Diagnostic Report on Norway. 

This diagnostic report applies the framework of the OECD Skills Strategy to identify 12 skills challenges for Norway as it seeks to maximise its future skills potential. These skills challenges were distilled from a series of interactive workshops held in the course of 2013 which engaged a wide range of stakeholders including employers’ organisations, trade unions, local and county governments, student associations and education institutions. The report marshals a wide array of OECD evidence, including Norway’s results from the Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC), to shed light on the issues and offers concrete examples of how other countries are tackling similar skills challenges.

One of the key features of our collaboration with Norway over the past year has been the driving role played by the project team whose members are drawn from five ministries – education, labour, finance, industry and trade, local government and modernisation. This reflects the government’s strong commitment to cross-ministerial co-ordination in tackling skills challenges. As Norway’s project moves into the action phase this year we can expect to see innovative and practical ideas for tackling skills challenges emerge from this broad-based partnership across, and beyond, government.

So what are the main skills challenges facing Norway today? 

With regard to developing relevant skills, the report concludes that Norway would do well to focus its efforts on:

1. Ensuring strong foundation skills for all

2. Reducing drop-outs

3. Informing educational choices.

When it comes to activating its skills supply, Norway will need to tackle the challenges of:

4. Enhancing labour-market participation among those receiving disability benefits

5. Encouraging labour market attachment among low-skilled youth

6. Ensuring Norwegians remain active longer

Norway could make more effective use of the skills it has by: 

7. Engaging employers in ensuring a highly skilled workforce

8. Promoting innovation and entrepreneurship

9. Enhancing the use of migrants’ skills

Finally, Norway could improve the enabling conditions underpinning the overall skills system by:

10. Facilitating a whole-of-government approach to skills

11. Ensuring local flexibility and adaptability for nationally designed policies

12. Building partnerships at the local and national level to improve implementation.

In the coming months, we’ll also be releasing OECD Skills Strategy Diagnostic Reports for Austria and Korea.  It’s an exciting time, as we help map out countries’ skills challenges and work together to address them. 

As we do, we’re taking on board not just government’s perspectives but those of stakeholders. We’re learning from comparative data as well as on-the-ground experience. 

And we’re moving beyond diagnosis to action. 

Links:

Diagnostic Report: Norway

Andreas Schleicher’s presentation at NHO, 8 January

OECD Skills Strategy

Survey of Adult Skills

For more on skills and skills policies around the world, visit: http://skills.oecd.org/

See also the country pages on skills for Norway, Austria and Korea

Related blog posts on skills:

Skill up or lose out, by Andreas Schleicher

Let’s talk about skills, by Joanne Caddy

Image Source: OECD

Kazakhstan: the dream of better education

By Mihaylo Milovanovitch
Rapporteur and Team Leader for the OECD Review of Secondary Education in Kazakhstan

Everybody dreams of good things sometimes, of things one wants to do, be, or have. Countries can dream too: of economic prosperity, of peace, of a visa-free travel regime or of a quick way out of a recession…

Kazakhstan dreams of better education. The State Programme for Education Development 2011-2020 notes that by 2020 the country will be highly educated, with a smart economy and highly qualified labour force. The young state has many other dreams, but they all depend on this one dream coming true.

The leadership of the country seems determined and its vision for the future of national education is more than just a wish. It is a comprehensive strategy for a full overhaul of the education sector and its transformation into a carrier of hope for economic, political and socio-cultural prosperity. The price tag of this commendable undertaking is commensurately high. Between 2005 and 2012 spending on education has increased six-fold, by some USD 3.2 billion (PPP).

The Government of Kazakhstan invited the OECD to document to what level the authorities are “walking the talk” with respect to their ambitious plans and assess whether education reforms are on the right track. The first of several OECD education policy reviews undertaken in response (Reviews of National Policies for Education: Secondary Education in Kazakhstan) was released this January. The review takes a close look at the strengths and weaknesses of secondary education bearing in mind the profound changes ahead and discusses equity, assessment and quality of learning outcomes, policies for teachers and principals, education financing, and vocational education and training.

If education reforms were a train, operating it would require an engine to push (or pull) the carriages, tracks that point in the right direction, patience in the steep sections where the train slows down, firmness where it speeds up too much and, yes, high initial investment.

The OECD review took more than 12 months of careful work and a fruitful, in-depth dialogue with the country. It concludes that Kazakhstan is achieving remarkable progress in putting together a new, state-of-the-art reform “engine” and setting it on the right reform “track”. The evidence suggests, however, that the engine is much faster and stronger than the (outdated) “carriages” it is meant to pull.

Between 2010 and 2012 the centrally-administered State Programme for Education Development claimed up to 29% of the overall education budget and 40% of the increase in education spending. Despite (or maybe because of) the strong bias in favour of new ideas and pilots, vast parts of the regular school network remain underfunded, underdeveloped and untouched by the new ideas being launched. The OECD report expresses concerns about the feasibility of introducing reforms in schools and VET colleges that are under-resourced and outdated in terms of teaching and assessment practices, and where education professionals lack the support they need in their work. Another concern is that old and new policy priorities alike show great emphasis on rewarding excellence in students, teachers and schools, but fail to focus on reducing inequities in the system, for example by providing incentives and state-of-the-art training to teachers (and principals) struggling to help underperforming students. This group accounts for well over 40% of the student population in all the subject domains assessed by PISA in 2012 (mathematics, reading and science).

Some dreams are just compensation for a disappointing present. Other dreams come true. The OECD report contains a series of recommendations that are meant to help transform a good reform start in Kazakhstan into a successful onward journey. The timing seems right as the authorities adjust their plans amidst a growing awareness that the train of education reforms can only go as fast and far as its slowest, most fragile “carriages” allow.

Links:
Reviews of National Policies for Education: Secondary Education in Kazakhstan
The State Programme for Education Development 2011-2020
PISA 2012 Results
Photo Credit: A Vintage Steam Engine Pulling Traditional Carriages / @ Shutterstock

Mathematics for the 21st century

By Charles Fadel
Founder and Chairman, Center for Curriculum Redesign

Why are mathematics taught? 
From Aristotle, Plato, Al-Khawarizmi, and Al-Kindi, to John Allen Paulos (Temple U.), Paul Ernest, (U. of Exeter), and Eleanor Robson (U. of Oxford), maths thinkers have stated three types of reasons: emotional, cognitive and practical. 

Setting aside the emotional and cognitive reasons, let’s discuss the implications of the practical reasons. Mathematical understanding is crucial for high performance in our personal, public, and work lives. At home, we may want to understand the results of a medical test, or rekindle our child's love of math. As citizens, we may want to judge the rise in carbon-dioxide levels in the air, or the proportion of tax dollars that should go to health, education, or war. At work, we may need to estimate the money, time, and employees for a large project. Finally, mathematics underlies our science, technology, and engineering.  OECD countries spend $236 billion per year on mathematics education yet most countries report shortages in Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) talent.

How is the breadth of mathematical application reflected in PISA? 
There are four contexts assessed: personal (self, family and peer groups), societal (one's community), occupational (the general world of work) and scientific (application to science and related issues and topics). These contexts are outstanding choices. Furthermore, by weighting them equally, PISA ameliorates the misconception that mathematics is useful only in the scientific context.

How do we make maths relevant for all occupations, and for new occupations?
The synthesis of research by the OECD and the Royal Society highlights the need to rebalance traditional mathematics (geometry, algebra and calculus) with new branches (statistics and probabilities, applied maths and discrete maths) which are relevant for a wide swath of occupations.  

The OECD Global Science Forum Report on Mathematics in Industry describes the needs for different types of mathematics: statistics & probabilities; complex systems; computational maths. Additionally, the Royal Society’s ACME 2011 “Mathematics in the workplace and higher education” highlights requirements such as: mathematical modelling (e.g. energy requirement of a water company; cost of sandwich); use of software and coping with problems (e.g. oil extraction; dispersion of sewage); costing (allocation; dispute management) (e.g. Contract cleaning of hospital; management of railway); performance and ratios (e.g. Insurance ratios; glycemic index); risk (e.g. clinical governance; insurance); and quality/SPC control (e.g. furniture; machine downtime; deviation of rails).

How are maths used in personal and societal contexts?
Again, personal and societal uses highlight the need to rebalance traditional mathematics (geometry, algebra and calculus) with new branches (statistics and probabilities, complex systems) and deepening the understanding of basic arithmetic (number sense and proportionality).

John Allen Paulos, Mathematician at Temple University, and Author of “A Mathematician reads the newspaper“ has stated: “Gullible citizens are a demagogue’s dream… almost every political issue has a quantitative aspect”.

In PISA, Personal uses, mostly arithmetic and spatial, encompass: personal finance, proportional reasoning, understanding technical documents (plans, charts, etc.), mental maths (percentages, four operations, mental calculating including estimating, etc.), estimation (measures/references/distances such as navigation, etc.), basic geometry (billiards, parking, etc.), and spatial reasoning.

Societal uses - related to data, logic, scale, chance, relationships – are defined in PISA as: structured logical arguments, understanding data (statistical), chance/risk/uncertainty (probabilities), visualization and presenting data, magnitude of numbers (budgets, taxes, etc.), rate of change (exponential, logarithmic, S-curve, etc.), understanding systems and scale (ecology, etc.) including identifying relations between objects.

How can we achieve a more numerate society?
Shockingly perhaps, none of this is particularly new!  A 1982 US National Science Foundation report stated: 
“more emphasis on estimation, mental maths…
“less emphasis on paper/pencil execution…”
“content in… algebra, geometry, pre-calculus and trigonometry need to be… streamlined to make room for important new topics.”
“discrete mathematics, statistics/probabilities and computer science must be introduced”.

The Center for Curriculum Redesign’s Stockholm Declaration has stated:
“We call for a far deeper and reconceptualized understanding of mathematics by the entire population as a critical right, requiring:

• a new vision of mathematics education that anticipates needs and reinforces the role of mathematics in society, economies, and individuals, and strengthens gender equity,
• changes to existing Mathematics standards as presently conceived, through a significant rethinking of what branches, topics, concepts and subjects should be taught in Mathematics for human, economic, social and career development…”

Humanity has a very large stake in making these goals happen, and to do so very soon.

Links:
“What should students learn for the 21st Century?™: The Center for Curriculum Redesign
PISA 2012 Results
Image Source: Charles Fadel, Center for Curriculum Redesign

Students’ choices today shape tomorrow’s skills pool

by Dirk Van Damme
Head of the Innovation and Measuring Progress division, Directorate for Education and Skills

One of the most decisive decisions taken in the course of a person’s life is choosing the field of study when entering higher education. This decision may be influenced by a variety of factors: family, social and economic background; cultural preferences among peers; values and belief systems; or even moral, political or ideological viewpoints. Preceding choices made during transitions in secondary school, have gradually narrowed the options available. Conflicting messages from employers, labour market agencies, governments and intermediary advisory bodies can impact the choices students make as well.

Nonetheless, students – mostly at the age of 18 – still have a fairly broad range of options to choose from. And today’s students no longer want to be the passive and obedient followers of antecedents, decisions made by others or well-intended advice. This is a decisive moment in which they take their own life in their own hands. Research on choice behaviour of students indicates that objective information, advice from teachers and counsellors or labour market prospects, do not have as much of an impact on the decision-making process as personal preferences and interests.

The latest issue of the Education Indicators in Focus series (No. 19) highlights the fields of study chosen by new entrants to higher education in OECD countries. The chart above illustrates that in European countries social studies, which includes business and law, is by far is the most frequently chosen field of study. On average, 32% of new entrants across OECD countries enrol in programmes in this field. Only in Finland and Korea is engineering, manufacturing and construction a more popular choice. In contrast, the field of natural sciences attracts only a small minority of students.

One of the most important dimensions in choice patterns is gender. The rapid increase in the number of female students has not yet altered the gender imbalances in certain fields of study, and on the contrary seems to have deepened them. Only 14% of female students enter a sciences programme, in contrast with 39% of male students. In contrast, education, health and welfare paint the opposite picture.

Students perceive their choices as purely individual decisions. And they make their choice with the optimistic belief that they will succeed in life, whatever the demands of the labour market. Yet, on an aggregate level they add up to a country’s future pool of human capital. The supply of high-level qualifications and skills is structured by a gendered partition between disciplines, each with their own specific configuration of skills and body of knowledge. The structure of human capital determines a country’s future range of possibilities in terms of economic and social development. Mismatches will always exist, but if they become large enough, a country has no alternative than to counterbalance this through high-skilled immigration. Countries acknowledge this risk and do take action to shift student choice patterns in a more desirable direction, by encouraging students, especially female students, to join STEM fields. These are all laudable and necessary actions, but it is unlikely that they will be able to significantly align student choices with future labour demand.

Even in the case of structural skills mismatch, the profile of a country’s future human capital should not be seen as a fatal verdict. Skills development is a dynamic process. Choices made at age 18 are important, but they do not condemn individuals or countries. Labour mobility across sectors and professions is an important phenomenon in today’s economies. New industries and occupations generate jobs and often recruit from various disciplines and professional backgrounds or bring new professions to life. (Why are there so many philosophers in the IT-industry?) Countries can prepare for future opportunities for growth by strengthening transversal skills in curricula, by fostering entrepreneurship and flexibility, and also by improving access to continuing education and training. Ultimately students have their own preferences when choosing a field of study and countries must cope with the outcomes of seemingly irrational choices.

Links:
Education Indicators in Focus, issue No. 19, by David Valenciano
On this topic, visit:
Education Indicators in Focus: www.oecd.org/education/indicators 
On the OECD’s education indicators, visit:
Education at a Glance 2013: OECD Indicators: www.oecd.org/edu/eag.htm

Chart source: OECD Education at a Glance 2013: Indicator C3 (www.oecd.org/edu/eag.htm)

Don't give up on ‘Education for All’

by Andreas Schleicher
Deputy Director for Education and Skills and Special Advisor on Education Policy to the OECD's Secretary General

The well-being of individuals and nations depend on nothing more than on what people know and what they can do with what they know. And if there’s one lesson the global economy has taught us over the last few years, it’s that we cannot simply bail ourselves out of a crisis, that we cannot solely stimulate ourselves out of a crisis and that we cannot just print money our way out of a crisis. Investing in high-quality education is the gateway to better skills, better jobs and better lives.

And yet, the 2014 Global Monitoring Report, the world’s most authoritative source to track progress towards the ‘Education for All’ goals, paints a bleak picture. With the deadline for these goals less than two years away, progress has been insufficient to get close to even a single goal by 2015. To date, just half of young children have access to some form of pre primary education, and in sub-Saharan Africa it is less than one in five. Universal primary education is likely to be missed by a wide margin, with 57 million children still having no access to any schooling. Access is not the only crisis: one third of primary school age children are not learning the basics, whether they have been to school or not, and even those who eventually graduate may not find jobs because their education hasn't been in sync with the skills that societies need.

It would be a grave mistake to consider this exclusively or even largely an issue for conflict zones or the developing world, even if that's where those issues are most visible. When it comes to education, the world is no longer divided between rich and well-educated nations and poor and badly educated ones. Similarly, the challenge of poor schooling is not just about poor kids in poor neighbourhoods, but about many kids in many neighbourhoods. Last year, OECD countries invested over USD 230 billion into teaching children math in the industrialised world, but 23% of their 15-year-old students performed below the baseline Level 2 on the PISA 2012 mathematics assessment, showing that these students can barely use basic mathematical procedures and conventions to solve problems involving whole numbers. Worryingly, that proportion is exactly where it stood a decade earlier.

Those numbers matter, for the life chances of individuals, and for the growth prospects of nations. If all students attained at least Level 2 in the PISA mathematics assessment, the combined economic output of OECD countries could be boosted by USD 200 trillion. So the cost of low educational performance is far higher than any conceivable investment in improvement.

The Global Monitoring Report also shows how many adolescents lack essential foundation skills and adult literacy has hardly improved since 2000. Here too, the OECD’s Survey of Adult Skills finds that poor skills severely limit people’s access to better-paying and more-rewarding jobs and, at the aggregate level, inequality in the distribution of skills closely relates to how wealth is shared within nations. People with better skills are also more likely to volunteer, see themselves as actors rather than as objects of political processes, and are more likely to trust others. As the Global Monitoring Report notes, educated people are more likely to start a business, and their businesses are likely to be more profitable. In Uganda, owners of household enterprises with a primary education earned 36% more than those with no education; those with a lower secondary education earned 56% more. In short, fairness, integrity and inclusiveness in public policy thus all hinge on the skills of citizens.

That's the sad side of the story. The encouraging side is that, while there is so much to do in so many parts of the world, some countries show that it can be done. On PISA, countries like Brazil, Tunisia, and Turkey rose from the bottom, countries like Germany or Poland have moved from adequate to good, and countries like Singapore or Shanghai in China have moved from good to great. In some of PISA’s top performers, even the quarter of the socio-economically most disadvantaged children break through the cycle of disadvantage and reach high levels of student performance. Leaders in these countries have convinced their citizens to make choices that value education, their future, more than consumption today. And they believe in the possibilities for all children to achieve.

The Global Monitoring Report puts the focus on what matters most. Good teaching. The quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers. That is why top performing education systems pay attention to how they select and train their staff. They watch how they improve the performance of teachers who are struggling and how to structure teachers’ pay. They provide an environment in which teachers work together to frame good practice. And they provide intelligent pathways for teachers to grow in their careers. They invest resources where they make most of a difference, and they attract the most talented teachers to the most challenging classrooms. The lessons for policy and practice from these countries are clear, and it is time for the world to take notice.

The Global Monitoring Report rightly calls on governments to fix this. But the magnitude of the challenge suggests that countries will only succeed if they can make education everybody’s business. Where public resources remain insufficient, governments need to think harder about who should pay for what, when and how, and better align their resources with the challenges. Employers can do a lot to better integrate the world of learning with the world of work, offering high quality work-based learning that allows people to develop hard skills on modern equipment and soft skills, such as teamwork or negotiation in a real-world environment. Schools can do better in offering more relevant learning, recognising that the world no longer pays people for what they know, but for what they can do with what they know. Guiding people to make sound educational and career choices, with the latest labour-market intelligence at our fingertips, will help reduce the toxic mix of unemployed graduates and employers saying they cannot find the people with the skills they need. Labour unions can help make investments in learning translate into better-quality jobs and higher salaries. And at the end of the day, we all can take more responsibility for our learning and make better use of available learning opportunities.

None of that’s easy, but the Global Monitoring Report highlights what is possible. It takes away excuses from those who are complacent. And it helps set meaningful targets in terms of measurable goals achieved by the world’s educational leaders.

Links:
Education For All Global Monitoring Report
PISA for development
PISA 2012 results
OECD Skills Surveys
Photo credit: education sign  / @Shutterstock

School systems trump family background

by Andreas Schleicher
Deputy Director for Education and Skills and Special Advisor on Education Policy to the OECD's Secretary General

There has been much discussion on the extent to which the performance of nations on tests like PISA is shaped by the socio-economic context of families, schools and nations. Surely, economic, social and cultural capital are always an advantage. Owing to advantaged families’ greater capacity to reinforce and enhance the effects of schools, as students from these families attend higher-quality schools and schools are simply better-equipped to nurture and develop children from advantaged backgrounds, school systems tend to reproduce social disadvantage. And that is what the data from PISA have shown.

But there is more to this. There are huge differences across countries in the extent to which individual factors (such as family structure, parents’ job status and immigrant background), school factors (such as how resources are allocated across schools) and the broader economic context of education systems shape learning outcomes.

New analyses from PISA shed light on this. The chart above shows the performance of 15-year-old students in each country by decile of their social background. For example, the highest dots show how the 10% of students from the most privileged socio-economic backgrounds in the OECD area perform in each country. In turn, the lowest dots show how those students perform who belong to the 10% most disadvantaged students in the OECD area.

These data suggest several things. First, poverty isn’t destiny. For example, the poorest 15-year-olds in Shanghai – and there are lots of them, about 20% of the 15-year-old population in Shanghai compared to an OECD average of 12% comes from very poor families – do as well as the 10% most privileged students in the United States. Second, to foster excellence, you don't need to tolerate social disparities. For example, while students from the most privileged families in France and the Netherlands perform similarly, the bottom decile in the Netherlands still match the performance of the 3rd decile of French 15-year-olds. Last but not least, the data clearly show that, for many countries, the issue is not just with poor kids in poor neighbourhoods, but with many kids in many neighbourhoods: The top 10% of students from advantaged backgrounds in the United States do just about as well as their peers in Italy and Spain.

The bottom line is that the country where you go to school seems to have a much greater impact on your learning outcomes than the social background of your family or even your country.

Links:
PISA 2012 Results
Shanghai (China) – PISA
Strong performers and Succesful Reformer: Shanghai
Related blog posts by Andreas Schleicher:
Are the Chinese cheating in PISA or are we cheating ourselves?
What we learn from the PISA 2012 results
Learning in rural China: The challenges for teachers
Chart source: OECD, PISA 2012 Database.