Think Green: education and environmental awareness

by Tracey Burns and Roxanne Kovacs
Directorate for Education and Skills

The environment is a hot topic in the press and classrooms across the world and much has been said about the need for action to protect our planet. If current trends in climate change continue, temperatures could increase between 3 and 6 degrees Celsius by 2050. Such large temperature increases would lead to water shortages for billions of people, reduce agricultural yields, increase malnutrition related deaths by millions and lead to the extinction of a large part of animal species.

Education plays a crucial role in raising awareness of environmental challenges and shaping the attitudes and behaviours that can make a difference. A recently released Trends Shaping Education Spotlight looks at the role of education in both preparing and providing our citizens with the skills needed for a sustainable and productive future.

A first step in addressing the issue is raising awareness. Many classrooms already discuss important issues like recycling or sustainable consumption. However we need to do much more – results from the last PISA test that looked specifically at environmental science show that on average across the OECD, only 19% of students performed at the highest level of proficiency. Students at this proficiency level were aware of environmental issues and understood their complexity, which suggests that they have an adequate understanding of the challenges that climate change presents.

Some countries do better than others: in Canada, Finland and Japan for example, more than 30% of students performed at the highest level of proficiency. However more must be done to improve the level of the poorest performers. On average across the OECD, 16% of students performed at the lowest proficiency level and in countries like Italy, Mexico and Turkey more than 20% of students perform at the lowest proficiency level. These students were unable to answer questions about basic environmental phenomena. They were also much more likely to be overly optimistic about environmental issues and much less aware of the dramatic consequences of inaction.

So, what can be done? The performance of students in environmental science is closely related to performance in traditional science courses (such as physics, biology and chemistry). Better science education in general can thus be combined with specialised courses in order to increase student proficiency in environmental science. The next cycle of PISA (in 2015) will again focus on science issues and will be an opportunity to verify which countries have taken the lead on the topic and which are falling behind.

The need for green skills extends beyond basic education. Vocational education programmes are important in preparing students to be flexible and adaptable to changing standards and requirements. In fact, countries already struggle to provide workers with the right skillset. For example, German and Spanish authorities have signalled a lack in skilled photovoltaic workers to install and maintain solar electrical systems. Such skill shortages are a major impediment to the growth in these green industries. They also make the move to a green economy slower and more expensive than it could be.

For basic education as well as vocational education and training, policy measures such as work-based learning and the provision of better career guidance can be powerful tools to strengthen the link between skills development and the green-growth agenda of countries.

Universities also play an important role. In 2011, 220,000 students received university degrees in “green” subjects (for example, environmental protection and physical sciences (climactic research, meteorology)) across the OECD. This constitutes a 62% increase in “green graduates” since 1998, which is comparable to growth rates in fields like mathematics and statistics.

Even though it is important that individuals have the right technical skills and scientific knowledge to go green, this alone will not be enough. In order to act effectively, individuals need to be willing to trade off immediate gains (taking the car instead of less convenient public transport, for example, or turning the air conditioning up to maximum on hot days) for long-term sustainability. Making these choices requires critical thinkers who can connect their daily decisions to long-term consequences, not just for themselves, but for society as a whole. Our schools and universities must play their part in preparing us for this challenge.

Links:
Trends Shaping Education 2013
Green at Fifteen? How 15-year-olds perform in environmental science and geoscience in PISA
PISA 2009 Results: What Students Know and Can Do: Student Performance in Reading, Mathematics and Science (Volume I)
OECD Environmental Outlook to 2050
Greener Skills and Jobs, OECD Green Growth Studies
Center for Education Research and Innovation (CERI)
Photo credit: Recycling Girl / @Shutterstock

 

Poverty and the perception of poverty – how both matter for schooling outcomes

by Andreas Schleicher
Director, Directorate for Education and Skills

Note: The size of the bubbles is representing the strength of the relationship between mathematics performance and ESCS (Percentage of explained variance in mathematics performance)

Compensating for students’ socio-economic disadvantage is one of the greatest challenges facing teachers,school leaders and education systems as a whole. However, data from PISA show that some countries are much better at this than others.

Consider the chart above. The horizontal axis shows the percentage of lower secondary teachers who work in schools where their principal reported that more than 30% of students in their school were from disadvantaged homes.¹  The vertical axis shows the actual percentage of 15-year-old students from disadvantaged homes, measured by PISA’s internationally standardised index that summarises various indicators of socio-economic disadvantage, including parents’ income and education level, educational resources at home, and other family possessions.² In other words, the horizontal axis reflects school principals’ perception of disadvantage by national standards while the vertical axis reflects the prevalence of disadvantage as compared internationally.

Brazil, Chile, Malaysia, Mexico and Portugal are found in the upper right corner of the chart because their schools have a large share of disadvantaged children and that aligns with the reports of principals. The lower left corner includes the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Japan, Korea and Norway where disadvantage in schools is limited, and fewer than one in ten principals reports significant disadvantage.³ These are the results one would expect.

But actual disadvantage and principals’ perceptions of disadvantage don't always align: 65% of principals in the United States say that more than 30% of their students are from disadvantaged homes, far more than in any other country. However, the actual percentage of disadvantaged students reported by PISA is just 13%, marginally higher than in Japan and Korea; but in those two countries, only 6% and 9% of principals, respectively, report a comparable share of disadvantaged students in their schools. In other words, the actual incidence of child poverty is roughly the same among these three countries, but more than six times as many US principals reported that more than 30% of their students are disadvantaged. Conversely, in Croatia, Serbia and Singapore, more than 20% of students are disadvantaged, while 7% or fewer principals report significant populations of disadvantaged students.

Obviously, a child considered poor in the United States may be regarded as relatively wealthy in another country, but the fact that the perceived problem of socio-economic disadvantage among students is so much greater in the United States - and in France too - than the actual backgrounds of students also suggests that what school principals in some countries consider to be social disadvantage would not be considered such in others.

And there is a third important dimension, namely the actual impact of disadvantage on learning outcomes, which is shown by the size of the circles in the chart.⁴   That impact reflects whether an education system provides equitable learning opportunities. In countries like Finland, Iceland and Norway, one would expect this impact to be small because these countries have very little socio-economic disadvantage in their student populations. Achieving equity in school is easy when society distributes wealth and family education equitably. But the more impressive examples are countries like PISA top-performer Singapore, where disadvantage is significant, but its impact on learning outcomes is only moderate. These countries seem very good at nurturing the extraordinary talents of ordinary students and at ensuring that every student benefits from excellent teaching. In contrast, France has a comparatively small share of disadvantaged students, but school principals perceive this share to be large, and student learning outcomes are closely related to social background – more closely, in fact, than in any other country except Chile and the Slovak Republic. More generally, the results show that principals’ perception of disadvantage correlates with inequalities in education opportunities more strongly than real disadvantage does.

There is another way of looking at this: In Korea and Singapore, more than one in two students from the bottom quarter of the socio-economic spectrum score among the most proficient quarter of the world’s students on PISA; in Japan, 45% of disadvantaged students are similarly “resilient” and perform better on the PISA test than their backgrounds would predict. By contrast, in France and the United States, only around 20% of students are resilient, and in Israel, just one in 10 is.

So what does all this mean? Socio-economic disadvantage is a challenge to educators everywhere, but in countries like France and the United States, perceived disadvantage is far greater than real disadvantage and it makes a significant difference for student performance. In countries like Singapore, real disadvantage is far greater than school principals’ perception of it, but Singapore’s schools seem to be able to help their students overcome that disadvantage.

<sup>1. Or more precisely, the percentage of lower-secondary teachers in schools whose principals reported that more than 30% of students are from disadvantaged homes. Data are based on the OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS), which is representative of the teaching force in the participating countries.
2. Referred to as the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) index of economic, social and cultural status (ESCS).
3. Significant here means more than 30% of students from disadvantaged homes in the school.
4. Measured here by the percentage of variation in mathematics performance that is explained by the PISA index of economic, social and cultural status (ESCS).</sup>

Links
PISA 2012 Results: Excellence Through Equity: Giving Every Student the Chance to Succeed (Volume II)
The OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) - 2013 Results
Chart source: © OECD TALIS 2013 and PISA 2012 database

Education professionals as social innovators

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

The famous French social scientist Emile Durkheim – the founding father of the academic discipline of sociology of education – grounded the view that by transmitting society and culture into the next generation, education was inevitably looking more to the past than to the future. His legendary quote – “Education is only the image and reflection of society. It imitates and reproduces the latter… it does not create it” – coined the notion of education merely ‘reproducing’ societies. When social change accelerates, it is no surprise that the ‘conservative’ role of education becomes increasingly perceived as a problem in itself. Today, many economic and political leaders tend to share the view that education is losing the race with technology and is not changing fast enough to cope with future challenges.

But is this a fair account? And how do professionals in the education sector view their own jobs? There are very few data sources to empirically assess the innovative potential of education. Measurement of innovation has progressed significantly in recent years, but applying such measures on education has been rare. The most recent issue of OECD Education Indicators in Focus, based on the new publication Measuring Innovation in Education: A New Perspective produced by the Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI), analyses measures of innovation in education by using data of the Research into Employment and Professional Flexibility (REFLEX) (2005) and Higher Education as a Generator of Strategic Competences (HEGESCO) (2008) surveys in 19 European countries on how tertiary graduates working in education perceive their own jobs. The results are surprising: no less than 59% of education professionals hold a highly innovative job.

Jobs are defined as highly innovative when tertiary educated employees say that they work in an organisation at the forefront of innovation and that they contribute themselves to innovation. With this measure of innovation it becomes possible to compare education with other sectors in society. In the manufacturing sector, 64.4% of the tertiary educated professionals work in highly innovative jobs, but education follows closely with 59.0%, well above the average across all sectors of 54.9%. The health sector, commonly perceived as more innovative than education, only counts 50.4% of jobs defined as highly innovative. Public administration closes the list with 39.5%. It is less of a surprise that within education there are huge differences between primary, secondary and tertiary (or higher) education: the higher education sector is, with 69.2%, the most innovative one, while primary (56%) and secondary (54%) education are situated much lower, but still around the cross-sector average.

Innovation research distinguishes between three types of innovation: ‘knowledge or methods’, ‘products or services’, and ‘technology, tools or instruments’. On average across sectors, innovation in knowledge or methods is the most prevalent one (36.6%), followed by innovation in products or services (28.8%) and innovation in technology, tools or instruments (21.3%). Education shares the same ranking of types of innovation, but with greater differences. Of all sectors, education has the highest percentage of highly innovative jobs in knowledge or methods: 48.5% (in higher education alone even going to 59.5%!). On the other hand, education is on the low side regarding innovation in technology, tools or instruments: only 20.6% (29.6% in higher education) of the tertiary educated professionals in education see their job as highly innovative for this type of innovation.

These data – which are innovative in themselves – put education in a different light than Emile Durkheim did more than a century ago. The idea that education is intrinsically conservative should be revisited, or at the least nuanced. Education professionals seem to align themselves more with the opposite view, of which John Dewey, the famous American philosopher of education, is the main exponent. By leading the next generation into the future, Dewey saw education as intrinsically progressive. In one of his most inspiring quotes – “Education is a social process. Education is growth. Education is not a preparation for life; education is life itself” – he equated education with growth and change, just as life itself. The progressive movement in American education of the mid-20th century was very much inspired by this idea and demonstrated that education could indeed lead the way in transforming society.

In various aspects education is as innovative as many other sectors, in some cases even more so. Certainly, a lot more should be done to make education a truly transformative engine of social change, to align it better to the changes 21st century societies are experiencing. But divergent views among stakeholders on the future of education should be discussed on their own terms, and not presented as a lack of innovation.

These data also show that it is good to listen to the voice of educational professionals themselves before making normative judgments on the education system. A few weeks ago the OECD published the results of the TALIS 2013 survey, an international survey of teachers on their profession and their working conditions. The TALIS data also present a different view on education than what outsiders typically believe: one of teachers generally satisfied with their job, confident that they are up to the challenges, but demanding more professional working conditions and a greater respect from society. The new data on innovation in education bring a similar message: education professionals presenting themselves as social innovators in a system perfectly capable of guiding social transformation.

Links:
Education Indicators in Focus, Issue No. 24, by Stéphan Vincent-Lancrin and Gwénaël Jacotin
TALIS 2013 Survey
Measuring Innovation in Education: A New Perspective
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

What do teens know about money?

By Andreas Schleicher, 
Director, Directorate for Education and Skills

 

It used to be about what to do with the babysitting money; now it’s all about trying to get the best value for money. Or is it? What do 15-year-olds really know about money matters? Can they make sensible decisions about whether to spend or save? Can they tell the difference between a financial risk and a sound investment? (For that matter, how many of the rest of us can?)

Eighteen countries participating in PISA wanted to find out. They conducted the first-ever international assessment of students’ financial literacy. The results from that survey, released today, are presented in this month’s PISA in Focus.

The financial literacy assessment, which was administered as an option in parallel to the international PISA test, was conducted among 29 000 students – representing around nine million 15-year-olds – in the participating countries and economies.

What the assessment shows is just how varied are students’ knowledge of and understanding about money matters. Across the 13 participating OECD countries and economies, only one in ten students scores at the highest financial literacy proficiency level – Level 5. These students can solve non-routine financial problems, such as calculating the balance on a bank statement, taking into account such factors as transfer fees, and can demonstrate an understanding of the wider financial landscape, including the implications of income-tax brackets. At the other end of the proficiency spectrum, 15% of students, on average, score below the baseline level of performance, Level 2. At best, these students can recognise the difference between needs and wants, make simple decisions about everyday spending, recognise the purpose of everyday financial documents, such as an invoice, and apply single and basic numerical operations (addition, subtraction or multiplication) in contexts that they are likely to have personally encountered.

Students in Shanghai-China score the highest in financial literacy, with a mean score of 603 points, 103 points above the OECD average. Students in Australia, the Flemish Community of Belgium, the Czech Republic, Estonia, New Zealand and Poland also score higher than the OECD average.

Coming on the heels of the biggest global financial crisis since the Great Depression – one felt keenly by millions of young adults who are having trouble finding work after they graduate from school – and at a time when financial products and services are becoming increasingly complex, the results show that, even in some of the countries that performed well on the assessment, there are sizeable populations of students who lack essential financial skills. That is of concern. Students who have difficulties with simple things, like assessing the long-term liabilities arising from debt, risk getting ripped off by outrageous interest rates on their credit cards. And let’s remember that one of the triggers of the global financial crisis was the corrosive mix of people living beyond their means combined with unscrupulous lending practices.

So what can we do about this? Countries approach the goal of preparing students for an ever-more complicated financial world very differently. Some have begun to introduce financial education explicitly in their school curricula, which can help strengthen the links between school and real life. But of course, other interest groups are doing that too: those who want to make sure that there is digital education to strengthen digital literacy, health education to strengthen health literacy, environmental education to strengthen environmental literacy, and so on, with the result that students often end up with mile-wide, inch-deep curricula that lack the depth on which to build solid foundations for learning. That may also explain why some of the countries where students have the greatest exposure to financial education don't do particularly well on financial literacy – or on any of the other PISA assessments.

Other countries place their efforts squarely on strengthening students’ conceptual understanding in key areas, such as mathematics, and then expect their students to be able to apply that understanding in different contexts, including financial ones. That risks disconnecting students from the real world. But the fact that the latter group includes top performer Shanghai, whose students show higher financial literacy skills than those in any other country, even though they are rarely exposed to financial contexts in school, shows that the question of how best to develop financial literacy is still very much open to debate.

Whatever the right balance between a focus on conceptual understanding and real-life application in school curricula, the results show clearly that many students need to have higher levels of financial literacy.

Links:
PISA 2012 Results
PISA in Focus No. 41: Do 15-year-olds know how to manage money?
Press release: First OECD PISA financial literacy test finds many young people confused by money
Launch of the OECD PISA Financial literacy assessment of students, 9 July 2014, Paris
Follow on twitter:  #OECDPISA and #OECDfe

What did we learn from TALIS?

by Kristen Weatherby

Senior Analyst, Directorate for Education and Skills

Last week we shared with the world the latest results from the OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) , at an Informal Meeting of Ministers of Education (17th OECD/Japan Seminar) held in Tokyo on 25-26 June. 

TALIS touched upon a wide range of teacher-centred topics, from professional development to collaboration and teaching practices. TALIS has revealed many areas about teacher policies and behaviour that should be encouraged to continue development of the profession as a whole. However, it has also highlighted areas in some countries that could benefit from reform. The results of TALIS were widely received across countries as valuable information from which school leaders, teachers and policy makers can benefit.

For example, at the launch event in Mexico last week, the OECD presented the finding that 1 in 4 Mexican teachers do not feel prepared for their work. Furthermore, the TALIS results indicate that Mexico has the lowest percentage of teachers who have completed initial teacher education (only 62% versus 90% on average across countries). Additionally, 7% of Mexican teachers do not feel qualified to perform their work. The Mexican Secretary of Basic Education, Alba Martinez Olive, conceded that the TALIS results were not surprising given the complex realities that Mexican teachers face.

At the U.S. launch of TALIS, it was very encouraging to learn that so many teachers love their jobs (nearly 90%) but less heartening to find that only around 40% of US teachers believe the best-performing teachers in their schools receive the most recognition. However, there was much discussion about the support that is provided to teachers, in terms of quality, professional development and feedback on their teaching. Participants in the U.S. launch discussed the importance of increasing in-depth collaboration between teachers and how school leaders and districts need to provide space and guidance for teachers to do this.

The Education Fast Forward debate (EFF 10) on the TALIS results further emphasised the significance of teacher collaboration, and the topic resonated amongst followers on Twitter. Participants also discussed the important role of interpersonal relationships between teachers in negating some of the otherwise detrimental effects that a challenging classroom climate might have on a teachers’ job satisfaction and feelings of self-efficacy.   

Meanwhile, in Spain, TALIS was launched at a National Seminar for teachers. Participants discussed the findings that feedback and appraisal mechanisms for teachers are rare in Spain. One-third of teachers (32%) report never having received feedback in their current school and less than half (43%) of teachers in Spain report receiving feedback following a classroom observation.

This is only a small sample of the wealth of national and international findings that are available from the TALIS data. More importantly, it’s not only the data, but what we do with the data that is important. In addition to the international report, country-specific findings and the TALIS dataset, you can also download the TALIS Teachers’ Guide on our website. This small report offers insights to teachers and school leaders as to how they can make changes to improve teaching and learning in their schools, based on key findings in TALIS. 

Links:

2013 TALIS Results 

Free Teachers’ Guide to TALIS 

Draft chair’s summary of the Informal Meeting of Ministers of Education

Congreso Presentación TALIS

Education Fast Forward debate
Data visualisation: Compare your Country on key OECD indicators