Understanding Employer Engagement in Education

by Anthony Mann
Director of Policy and Research, Education and Employers Taskforce, London, UK

Across the world, governments are asking themselves how can they close the gap between the worlds of education and employment? How can they better engage employers in the work of schools?

While hardly a new phenomenon, the attention of policy makers and commentators has grown significantly over the last decade.  It is a policy which has won the recent attention and the strong endorsement from the OECD – in its key 2010 strategic review of vocational education, Learning for Jobs – from European Union agencies (CEDEFOP and InGenious) – and from an influential team at Harvard University (Pathways to Prosperity).  In England, the main political parties no longer argue whether a period of one or two weeks work experience should be a mandatory element of secondary education, but at what age placements should best be undertaken.

Employer engagement has become rapidly established within global priorities for schooling.  It is a development which has happened largely in the absence, as set out in a new collection of essays published by Routledge, of significant research.  The collection, Understanding Employer Engagement in Education, marks the very first gathering together of serious research essays into the character, delivery and consequences of employer involvement in the learning and progression of young people.  It brings together insights from papers first offered at the international conferences and seminars arranged by the London-based education charity, the Education and Employers Taskforce.  Over seventeen essays, authors from around the world (if with a strong UK focus), analyse the phenomenon of employer engagement both within vocational education and training, through school or college based apprenticeships, and within mainstream academic schooling seen in such activities as careers talks, enterprise competitions, business mentoring and workplace visits as well as short work placements. Collectively, the contributors consider why governments have become so determined to bring workplace experiences into schooling, how such interventions can best be theorised and understood within labour markets undergoing radical change, what impacts school-mediated workplace exposure can be expected to have on recipients and how access to such experiences are distributed across society.

The collection is likely to gain most attention for three chapters which offer measurements of the impact of employer engagement in education on the educational and employment outcomes of young people.  Percy and Mann (Education and Employers Taskforce) apply quantitative analysis to recent UK survey data to show significant links between the extent of teenage employer contacts arranged through schools and later earnings, employment levels and self-declared career confidence. Massey (UKCES) explores the phenomenon from an employer perspective, analysing large scale polling to show how commonplace it is for British employers to take on permanent recruits after short periods of school-managed work placement.

From a Canadian and VET perspective, Taylor et al (University of Alberta) finds participants in school-based apprenticeships to achieve better in school and apprenticeship completion rates than peers.  The three studies add considerably to a relatively slim literature applying robust methodologies to provide the evidence that endorses the instincts of so many policy makers.

The ambition of the collection though is not just to measure gains related to employer engagement, but to critically understand how and why such benefits might be expected and to who can be expected to gain most from them.  The work begins by offering a long overdue attempt to conceptualise the experience of employer engagement within wider social and economic theory concerning the progression of young people through their educational experiences and into the labour market.  Louise Archer (King’s College, London) provides a critical review of the concept of aspiration and Julian Stanley (University of Warwick) and Anthony Mann (Education and Employers Taskforce) draw on human, social and cultural capital theory to offer a conceptual framework to help understand how young people encounter such employer contacts and how they might turn such experiences into resources of ultimate labour market value.  From a US perspective, James Stone III (University of Louisville) locates employer engagement firmly within pedagogic debates concerning the nature of practical and academic learning, while the OECD’s Kathrin Hoeckel describes the character of contemporary youth unemployment.  The collection locates employer engagement in education, consequently, squarely within fundamental debates over the relationship of education and skills provision to individual and national economic success and the changing character of school to work transitions.

Essays by Li and Devine (University of Manchester) and Holmes and Mayhew (University of Oxford) provide new quantitative analysis of longitudinal data tracking the winners and losers in the changing British labour market.  Casting new light on the nature of the problem, studies of British teenagers in urban areas by St Clair et al (University of Glasgow) and Norris (RSA) and Francis (King’s College, London) show teenage career aspirations to be almost uniformly high, but formed without “the active knowledge of what the labour market offered or close knowledge of the educational requirements of particular occupations.”

In the British context, through a series of essays it becomes clear that it is young people from more disadvantaged backgrounds who are placed at structural disadvantage in attempting to access workplace experiences to inform developing career aspirations and to provide access to resources of value to their progression out of secondary schooling.  Teenagers educated in English fee-paying schools are seen, in essays by Mann and Kashefpakdel (University of Bath), Huddleston et al (University of Warwick) and Jones (University of Manchester), to be routinely accessing work placements and careers related engagements closely linked to occupational ambitions and highly relevant to immediate designs on university admission.  In contrast, Le Gallais and Hatcher (Birmingham City University) show how social circumstances dictate access to work experience placements, unless schools actively intervene to secure and manage placements. Through these chapters, the influence of social and cultural capital theory is writ large. Bourdieu and Granovetter have much to say of relevance to contemporary policy.

In their foreword to the collection, Nancy Hoffman (Boston’s Jobs for the Future) and  Robert Schwartz (Harvard University) reflect on the significance of the issues raised in the book following their own participation in the OECD’s Learning for Jobs review.  “The urgency to engage employers in the transition from school to work in not only about the labour market”, they write. “It’s about the welfare of young people.  Youth unemployment has risen to historic proportions in many countries as a result of the global fiscal crisis, and youth across the world have articulated their frustrations about the lack of opportunities for their futures.”  In this context, the collection serves to introduce employer engagement in education as a new field of critical enquiry relevant to policy makers, practitioners and young people themselves as they seek to gain footholds in the shifting sands of the twenty-first century labour market.  In so doing, the book raises many important questions for ongoing research, marking the beginning of what is hoped will be an international exchange of evidence enabling fuller understanding of what can happen when a young person interacts with the economic community and how positive impacts can be most fully, and most equitably, distributed.

Links:
Understanding Employer Engagement in Education: Theories and Evidence, Edited by Anthony Mann, Julian Stanley and Louise Archer (London: Routledge, 2014)
OECD work on Vocational Education and Training (VET)
OECD work on Skills
Photo credit: Young employees / @Shutterstock

Are university students taking less time to graduate?

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

University is both a formative and enjoyable period in a young person’s life. Some who can afford to postpone their entry into the job market like it so much that they spend many years studying for a degree. Others have to repeat courses and semesters to succeed. Traditionally university programmes are designed as long and demanding trajectories, especially within Europe. In a paradigm of higher education, oriented towards the selection of the future elite, the length of study in itself works as a selection tool.

With massification of higher education from the 1970s onwards, as well as changes in the purpose and social functions of universities, the length of study became a policy issue. Each year of an individual’s study required  a significant public investment, therefore the time spent acquiring a degree became a budgetary concern. Moreover, time spent at colleges and universities was increasingly seen as an inappropriate mechanism of social selection, favouring those who had the resources to spend their young lives studying and punishing those unable to postpone earning a salary for too long. Additionally, demographic challenges increased the need to raise the activity rate in the population, and the need to recruit  young people for the job market sooner. Consequently, governments started to develop policies to shorten the length of study, shift some of the financial burden to students, and provide universities with the incentives for shorter study programmes.

By the time the Sorbonne and Bologna Declarations were discussed and approved, in 1998 and 1999 respectively, this policy challenge had become very real. In at least two of the signatory countries of the Sorbonne Declaration – Germany and Italy – studying until the age of 28 was the rule, not the exception. Ministers were very interested in the Anglo-Saxon qualification structure, because it would allow them to break up very long study programmes and stimulate students to acquire a first degree after only three or four years of study. Next to the objectives of having more comparable degree and credit systems and fostering mobility, the Bologna Declaration also intended to shorten study trajectories.

Data presented in the latest issue of the Education Indicators in Focus series allows us to evaluate the changes in the length of study careers, at least up until graduation with a first degree. Comparing OECD countries with available data, we learn that the median age of graduation decreased from 25.2 in 2005, to 25.0 in 2008 and down to 24.7 in 2011. This means that in 2011 the median student graduated half a year earlier than in 2005. The decrease differs across the age distribution: it is less significant for students graduating at a younger age, but it is very significant among students graduating at a higher age. The age of graduation at percentile 75 dropped from 28.7 in 2005 to 27.9 in 2011. Thus the share of students who took many years to graduate dropped significantly.

Students also entered universities at a slightly younger age, but the earlier age of graduation is predominantly determined by shortening the time spent acquiring a first degree. Between 2005 and 2011, the time taken to acquire a first degree fell by almost half a year, from 4.6 years to 4.2 years. Of course, many students pursue their studies beyond a first degree, but the combined effect of shorter study programmes and more effective study trajectories is quite significant.

These average changes conceal huge variations across countries. In some countries, the decrease in the median age of graduation between 2005 and 2011 is very marked. In Belgium, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Portugal and Slovenia, the median age fell by more than one year between 2005 and 2011. Despite the general trend, in some countries including Austria, Israel, Spain and Turkey, the median age of graduation actually increased during the same time frame. . Various institutional factors and participation patterns might explain these differences, but the socio-economic context should also be taken into account. For example, huge youth unemployment in Spain probably played a role in keeping students longer at university in 2011 compared to 2008.

The average decrease in the age of graduation, especially in countries where youth was less affected by the economic crisis and the job market still offered prospects for earning a living, might also be explained by composition effects. Students coming from less affluent families tend to have shorter studypaths, because they cannot afford to postpone earning a salary fortoo long. In several countries this is also noticeable in the increase of the number of students studying part-time. Flexible work-study arrangements allow students to combine study with work. When the economic crisis erupted in 2008, on average 19.6% of students studied part-time; in 2011 this number had  risen to 22.0%. The increase was very significant in again, Spain (from 12.2% to 27.1%), Germany (4.5% to 13.5%), Belgium (12.6% to 17.3%) and Canada (17.7% to 22.8%). Credit-systems and increased flexibility in study arrangements have provided more opportunities for part-time study and combined study-work trajectories. Of course, having more part-time students works against having a lower median age of graduation.

Today a first university degree – in most cases a bachelor’s degree – takes less time to acquire than in the past. Pressures on students to graduate faster have increased, both as a result of government policies, institutions’ actions to improve quality and efficiency and the general socio-economic context. University might be less leisurely, but on-campus life, learning soft skills such as making friends and forming social networks, is still an essential part of nurturing successful study.

Links:
Education Indicators in Focus, Issue No. 23, by Dirk Van Damme and Corinne Heckmann
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

The OECD Tohoku School: Moving forward together

Interview with Kohei Oyama and Yoko Tsurimaki, Students of the OECD Tohoku School Project

During a break from the OECD Forum, two students (11th grade and 12th grade) from the OECD Tohoku School Project shared their learning experiences with Cassandra Davis and Meredith Lunsford of educationtoday. They began by explaining the student-designed OECD Tohoku School logo. Like many things in Japan, every element of the logo has a significant meaning. The 15 multi-coloured arrows piercing through the bull’s-eye represent the 15 regions of Japan touched by the earthquake and subsequent tsunami in 2011. Each arrow carries a unique colour to represent the individually diverse personalities that the respective regions hold. The tri-coloured rings surrounding the arrows represent the past, present and future of Japan. The most significant facet of the logo is the individual arrows pointing upwards from right to left, following Japanese calligraphy. This is meant to represent each region’s path reaching toward a common goal: to move forward together.

educationtoday: The OECD places a high value on student motivation, curiosity and creativity. In collaboration with the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology and Fukushima University, there has been an importance placed on the idea of “creative recovery”. What does “creative recovery” mean to you? Why is “creative recovery” important (versus traditional forms of recovery and reconstruction)?

Kohei Oyama: There have been several types of recovery, with infrastructure being the basic component. But in Tohoku we have focused on creative recovery. We creatively think about the people affected by the tsunami and the futures that they seek. Then, we creatively think about how to draw people back into the impacted areas.

educationtoday: The OECD Tohoku School Project works through a series of project-based workshops which include lecturers, hands-on experiences and discussion. Has this project-based learning changed the way you learn? How?

Yoko Tsurimaki: What we do at the Tohoku School is different from a “regular” school in that we don’t follow a curriculum that is given to us by our teachers. Instead, we design the curriculum ourselves, we decide the best course of action to facilitate recovery and, then, we implement it.

educationtoday: What other Tohoku School derived methods can we use to foster creativity in order to facilitate recovery and reconstruction?

Kohei: The student-driven learning method used in the Tohoku School project is the best strategy for other schools to implement. The students have the freedom to decide what they want to learn and how they want to implement these ideas.

educationtoday: The students carrying out this project were anticipated to gain real-life skills such as initiative taking, leadership, critical thinking, co-operation and creativity. What are some of the skills that you learned through the Tohoku School project? What skills did you learn that you think will transfer into your real life? What skills do you imagine will be useful in your future career?

Kohei: The most important skill that I learned through this process is how to communicate effectively. Both inside the classroom and outside the classroom, communication is a necessity. If you have a great idea, you must still be able to communicate that idea to others in order to make it a reality. Otherwise, the idea will be lost through miscommunication.

Yoko: The most important skill I have learned is critical thinking. But, I have also learned so much about the differences in value systems inside and outside of Japan. Within Japan, there is increasing internationalisation and it is becoming more and more necessary for future generations to be able to communicate effectively with other people and other cultures.

educationtoday: Since the launch of the Tohoku School Project two and half years ago, the mission has been for the students to organise an international event here in Paris to show to the world the attractiveness and creative recovery of your country. What is the major achievement or the take away message from the Tohoku School?

Yoko: To be able to demonstrate how hard the junior high and high school students have worked. Through all of the ups and downs, we have persevered and accomplished what we set out to do.

Kohei: This journey has been like sailing on a ship. It wasn’t always easy and there have been many waves. However, if the ride had always been stable (like in school), we wouldn't have really learned the skills needed in real life situations, full of unexpected surprises! Instead, we have so much to take away from this experience.

As we concluded the interview, we were presented with t-shirts and bags that had been designed by the students of the Tohoku School. The appreciation of the OECD’s support on education and skills development in Japan is evidenced in the students’ answers to our questions as well as this meaningful gesture of gratitude.

Links:
OECD Tohoku School
OECD Forum
Japanese version of the OECD-Tohoku School website
Image: ©OECD Tohoku School

Education in the 21st Century: Five lessons from China

by Dr. Catherine Yan Wang
National Institute of Education Sciences

China has redesigned its education system since embarking on opening up the country and implementing reforms in the latter half of the 70s. The journey of change started from an ethos of “Orientation Towards Modernisation, Orientation Towards the Future, and Orientation Towards the World”, created during the late 70s, which went through a three-decade long reflection and debate on quality-oriented education (versus examination-oriented education). It  gained momentum in 2001 with an Action Plan for Invigorating Education for the 21st Century, and resulted in the ground-breaking Basic Education Curriculum Reform that profoundly changed education philosophy, content and pedagogy for education from Grade 1-12. After three decades, not only has China achieved universal access to basic education, Shanghai also became a top-performer in the PISA 2009 round of tests. And the changes continue. Although there are still many challenges and barriers facing the education system in China, several strategies and approaches proved to be workable and effective, including the following five lessons:

1) Evidence-based, participatory policy-making. Like many policies in China, the formulation of the Basic Education Curriculum Outline involved five steps: conducting surveys, drafting, consulting, experimenting and implementation and expansion. It began with a stakeholder survey including teachers, parents, researchers, local authorities and communities, followed by the drafting of the document by a team consisting of researchers, practitioners and administrators. It then went through consultations with schools, teachers and local governments, to solicit their opinions on the relevance and feasibility of the policy. The policy for trial was piloted in four provinces and amended on the basis of piloting. The finalised Outline was then implemented nationwide.

2) Provision of professional support to teaching. China created a Teaching Research System, to provide ongoing support to teachers’ classroom methods, which consisted of teaching research institutes at provincial, prefecture (municipality) and county levels. The researchers, mostly selected from the best in the profession, support other teachers’ work by coordinating school-based research projects, regular visits to schools, interpreting curriculum standards, analysing classroom teaching, preparing teaching lessons, developing teaching materials and distilling best practices for extension (e.g. through demonstrations). Some of the institutes have been integrated with teaching training college and this has made teaching research a booster of teachers’ professional development.   

3) Learning from the world. China, its government agencies, research institutions and even schools all look to other countries’ experiences for inspiration in the process of making changes for improvement.  Since the 1980s, government officials have made many overseas study tours to learn different practices.  These brief glimpses of the outside world have impacted their way of thinking and how they do their work. Major studies almost always contain a component of international comparative study to benchmark against developed countries, and draw upon best practices in order to generate policy recommendations. The schools, in their pursuit of internationalisation, developed exchange partnership with overseas counterparts, and also kept on learning from the outside world to update their teaching content and methods.

4) Experimentation. Partly originating from a principle borrowed from the economic reform, “cross the river by touching stones,” various new thoughts and ideas have continually been tried as experiments in the education system, with successful experiments often being translated into policies. A typical example is the “Shiyi Experimental School”: it abandoned the  traditional way of organising students’ learning in fixed classes on dozens of subjects, and instead, developed over
1 000 courses from which 4 600 students could choose, many of them relating to emerging issues of the 21st century. This has recently sparked a nationwide debate on how to deliver education in China.

5) Balancing between unity and diversity. In 2001, China adopted a three-level curriculum structure aligned with the principle of “common basics, diversified options” that encompasses national, local, and school-based curricula, of which the national curriculum accounts for 80%, and local and school-based curriculum 20%. Such a structure ensures that all the students master fundamental knowledge and skills, while leaving schools ample room for experimentation and innovation.

It is hard to generalise about education development, given its inherent complexity which is only compounded by the size and diversity of such a large country as China. The Chinese idiom “Bearing a global perspective (the big picture) in mind, and start from a (small) concrete action” might best summarise and illustrate lessons for China in setting educational policy for the 21st century . Education can, and will, make a difference on students' learning and social well-being, especially when taking into consideration the tremendous changes happening in the 21st century and the actions that will be taken in the future to meet these challenges and opportunities step by step.

Links:
Global Education Innovation Initiative (GEII)
PISA 2012 results
Video series: Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education - Shanghai, China 
Related blog posts:
A new direction for education reform in China, by Dr. Catherine Yan Wang 
Implementing educational reform in China, by Andreas Schleicher
Image Credit: Students and teacher looking at globe / @Shutterstock

Is more time spent in the classroom helpful for learning?

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

In OECD countries, between the ages of 6 and 15 – this is the age-bracket covered by compulsory education, including primary and lower secondary education – children are supposed to spend their days at school. All countries attach great value to schooling and expect children to learn the foundation skills during their time spent in formalised instruction. Therefore, one would expect there to be a shared view on how much time exactly children should spend in school.

The most recent issue of the Education Indicators in Focus series shows however that there is actually no common view. The data on the total number of instructions hours in primary and lower secondary education per country (see chart above) show a surprising variation in the number of hours OECD countries expect children to be at school. The OECD average total intended instruction time is 7 751 hours, but the instruction-time requirements range from 6 054 hours in Hungary to 10 710 hours in Australia. This means that the total time Hungarian children spend in school is only 56.5% of what their Australian peers have to spend. Even if we forget the outliers, we cannot ignore that the discrepancies between countries with very similar educational systems and histories are striking: the total intended instruction time in the Flemish Community of Belgium is only 71.5% of that in the Netherlands. And yet, both countries’ educational systems share many features and are performing very similarly in many educational outcome measures.

How much does instruction time actually matter then? Comparing country-level data on instruction time with PISA 2012 data on learning outcomes for mathematics does not seem to support the hypothesis that more instruction time leads to better student learning outcomes. As far as there is any relationship, it actually goes the other way: the 10 countries with the highest instruction time have a mean PISA score for mathematics, which is 20 score-points below that of the 10 countries with the lowest amount of instruction time. More than 2 700 hours of instruction in primary and lower secondary education do not seem to make a difference in learning outcomes at the end of that period. And at first sight more instruction time does not help reducing the proportion of low-achieving students either: the 10 countries with the highest number of instruction hours have 47% of 15 year-olds achieving at or below level 2 on the PISA math scale, compared with 40% for the 10 countries with the lowest amount of intended instruction time. It is likely that the amount of instruction time educational systems have settled on is related in quite complex ways to historical patterns and social conditions in countries. Or it may be a mere product of pure coincidence and tradition having gradually lost its social significance and relevance.

Of course, children do many more things than just sitting in the classroom, and they learn through many more daily activities than just going to school. After all, total instruction time in schools comprises an estimated 15% of total non-sleeping time of children aged between 6 and 15. From a learning perspective the remaining 85% is interesting. Some activities are school-related, such as homework, others expand formal learning into parallel environments, such as private tutoring or music lessons. In some countries these activities significantly increase the formal learning time beyond school-based instruction.  Children also participate in non-formal learning, such as sports, youth work and cultural activities. We should also not forget that children need time to play with friends, to engage in family time with parents and siblings, to learn from surfing the internet, to participate in social media, to watch television or just to enjoy being on their own. Very little is known about this crucial dimension of time of children and how it may contribute to learning. But several countries – mainly European ones such as Germany, Belgium, Austria, Nordic countries, etc. – who do not consider a very long school day for children as optimal for learning and well-being, attach great importance to safeguarding children’s play-time and joyful informal learning.

Completely different views on children’s learning time exist as well. In some countries activists and movements concerned with maximising learning opportunities for disadvantaged children seek to increase school-based instruction time, because they think it’s the only way to offer more favourable learning conditions to disadvantaged kids than the home or the street. Historically, this thinking aligns with some of the considerations which led to the implementation of compulsory education legislation one century ago.

There are many good reasons to bring children together in schools to offer them a powerful learning environment. But there doesn’t seem to be a shared view on exactly how much time children should spend in schools.

Links:
Education Indicators in Focus, Issue No. 22, by Eric Charbonnier and Nhung Truong
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



The Great Gatsby Curve: Does it really exist and is education the key?

by John Jerrim
Thomas J. Alexander Fellow, Directorate for Education and Skills

Income inequality is high and rising in a number of developed and developing countries. There are many potential economic, social and political consequences of this. But perhaps none are more worrisome than the possibility that rising income inequality will limit educational and economic opportunity in the next generation.

This supposed relationship between income inequality and intergenerational mobility has become widely known as the ‘Great Gatsby Curve.’ It is commonly shown using this graph with “Economic mobility” (differences in the chances of “making it” in life between individuals from rich and poor backgrounds) tending to be lower in countries that are more economically unequal.

This finding has caught the imagination of important public policymakers worldwide. It has been widely cited by high ranking public policymakers, best-selling authors  and Nobel Prize winning academics. But does this Great Gatsby relationship really exist? I have previously shown how the Great Gatsby Curve is highly sensitive to a number of data issues, and that more robust evidence using more cross-nationally comparable data is needed. Furthermore, if this relationship does exist, what are the mechanisms driving it? Academics have long argued that socio-economic inequality in educational attainment is likely to play a key role in economic mobility. But could this also explain why there is a link between income inequality and intergenerational mobility, and thus the presence of the Great Gatsby Curve?

I am attempting to answer these important policy questions during my OECD Thomas J. Alexander Fellowship. Using the Programme for International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) dataset, I am investigating how the link between family background, educational attainment and pay in later life varies across more than 20 OECD countries. These results are then compared to external information on income inequality drawn from the Luxemburg Income Study  to establish whether there is indeed a link between economic inequality, educational attainment and social mobility.

I am currently two months into my fellowship at the OECD offices/headquarters in Paris, and have noted several positive influences that the programme has had upon my career. I have benefitted hugely from developing contacts within the OECD, including the other Thomas J. Alexander fellows. These networks have undoubtedly enhanced this piece of research and are going to be pivotal in my future career as a cross-national comparative researcher. The strong links the OECD has with policymakers worldwide has been another significant advantage of the fellowship, providing the ideal platform to showcase my research internationally. The OECD has also provided the time and expert guidance I have needed to develop this project using their databases. This has stimulated a range of further research ideas, which I am intended to pursue in my application for future research grants. 

Links:
Programme for International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC)
OECD Thomas J. Alexander Fellowship
Photo credit: Retro style party / @Shutterstock

Why policy makers should care about motivating students

by Marilyn Achiron
Editor, Directorate for Education and Skills

What’s in it for me? Positive answers to that ubiquitous (and often crass) question may actually make a fundamental difference in how students learn. As this month’s PISA in Focus explains, students who are highly motivated to learn mathematics because they believe it will help them later on score better in mathematics – by the equivalent of half a year of schooling – than students who are not highly motivated.

Most students recognise that learning mathematics is important for their future studies and careers. Indeed, 75% of students agree or strongly agree that making an effort in mathematics is worth it because it will help them in the work that they want to do later on; 78% agree or strongly agree that learning mathematics can improve their career prospects; 66% agree or strongly agree that they need mathematics for what they want to study later on; and 70% agree or strongly agree that learning many things in mathematics will help them get a job.

Results from PISA 2012 show that, on average across OECD countries, the difference in mathematics performance between students who reported higher levels of motivation to learn mathematics and those with lower levels of motivation is 18 score points, or the equivalent of roughly half a year of schooling; in Korea, Norway and Chinese Taipei, the difference is greater than 30 score points. The results also reveal that motivation is particularly strongly associated with performance among the highest-achieving students. On average across OECD countries, the difference in PISA scores associated with instrumental motivation is 21 points among top performers while it is only 11 points among low achievers. In Belgium, France, Hungary and the Slovak Republic, the score difference, related to motivation, between high and low performers is larger than 20 points.

Perhaps surprisingly, students’ motivation is also associated with certain education policies – particularly those related to sorting or grouping students into different schools or programmes, such as general versus vocational programmes. PISA examined different ways of grouping students between schools and found that students’ motivation is lower in those school systems that offer a larger number of distinct education programmes; where larger proportions of students attend vocational or pre-vocational rather than academic programmes; where students are grouped or selected for these programmes at a younger age; where a large proportion of students attends academically selective schools; and where a large proportion of students attends schools that transfer students with low achievement, behavioural problems or special learning needs to another school.

While creating homogeneous student populations through grouping may allow teachers to tailor instruction to the specific needs of each group, selecting and sorting students generally reinforces socio-economic disparities, results in differences in opportunities to learn, and consequently, de-motivates large numbers of students who do not feel they are being given equal opportunities to succeed. Indeed, selecting students in these ways implies that only some students can achieve at high levels, and thus runs the risk of de-motivating the very students who would benefit the most if their parents, their teachers and their schools held high expectations for them. If students can’t find a good answer to the question why should I bother studying? then all of us have failed.

Links:
PISA 2012 Findings
Pisa in Focus No. 39: Are grouping and selecting students for different schools related to students’ motivation to learn?
PISA 2012 Results: Ready to Learn: Students' Engagement, Drive and Self-Beliefs
Photo credit: College math student /@Shutterstock

OECD Education GPS: The world of education at your fingertips

by Jean Yip,
Analyst, Directorate for Education and Skills

Today the OECD launched the “Review education policies” strand of the Education GPS, the online source for education data, research and analysis.

The “Review education policies” tool provides you with quick and easy access to the OECD’s extensive knowledge base of education. Its innovative visual network provides a new and exciting way to explore the world of education. Clear and concise key insights and policy options are already available for a wide range of topics. Related publications and links allow you to learn more about the OECD’s work on education. Keep checking back as the available knowledge base keeps growing!

The “Analyse by country” and “Explore data” parts of the Education GPS continue to give you the latest OECD data and statistics on education. Explore key indicators from Education at a Glance 2013, the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2012 and the OECD Skills Survey. Come back at the end of June to learn about the results from TALIS 2014!

Try it for yourself and explore the wealth of OECD’s data and analysis of education policies and practices!

Link:
Education GPS

Poorly skilled adults: a neglected factor in income inequality

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

The rise of income inequality in OECD countries, especially from 1985 onwards, is now a well-documented fact, and a reason for much concern among policy-makers and economists. The Gini coefficient of income inequality in 16 OECD countries with available data has risen from .286 in 1985 to .316 in 2010. The concept of ‘inclusive growth’ suggests that without finding an adequate and effective policy response to increasing inequality future sustainable economic growth might also be jeopardised. However, the causes and underlying mechanisms behind the increase in inequality are less clear. A new paper based on data from the Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC) hints to the role skills play in the puzzle behind income inequality.

At first sight, this seems a bit enigmatic. In recent decades huge investments have been made to improve the education and training of citizens in OECD countries. Consequently, the skills level of younger generations is higher than for older ones: on the PIAAC numeracy scale the mean score in the participating countries has increased from 259.9 among the 55-65 year-olds to 279.4 among the 25-34 year-olds. More workers with higher skills means more productivity and more income, at least that’s the conventional argument. Despite persistent challenges with regard to equitable access to education and equity in learning outcomes, the benefits of educational expansion have gradually been spread more evenly over the population (the education Gini has improved from .22 to .15 in OECD countries). But apparently that hasn't helped improve income inequality. The missing link is most likely the role played by the unequal distribution of skills among workers.

The proportion of adults at each end of the skills scale is one approach to measure the unequal distribution of skills. As the chart above illustrates, there is a pretty strong correlation of .59 between the share of low-skilled adults and the Gini coefficient. Spain, Italy, Ireland and Poland are, together with the United States, the countries with the highest numbers of low-skilled adults. At the other end of the scale we see a similar relationship: the share of high-skilled adults has a -.54 correlation with the Gini coefficient. As a result, the mean country score is quite strongly related to this measure of income inequality (-.63). Countries with high numbers of poorly skilled adults and low numbers of high-skilled tend to be countries with a high income inequality
Comparing the width of the distribution tells a similar, albeit slightly different story. How large is the skills gap between the highest and lowest quartiles in the skills distribution? The score point difference between the 75th and 25th percentiles ranges from 57 for the Czech Republic to 76 for the United States. But the interesting fact is that the width of the distribution is also related, although to a lesser extent (.40), to income inequality. The four countries which we identified as relatively low-skilled – Spain, Italy, Ireland and Poland – are situated in the middle of the pack, with a distribution width close to the average. The Nordic countries have similar gaps between the highest and lowest skilled 25%, but they have much lower levels of income inequality. A wide distribution of skills is seemingly not harmful in itself. It is noteworthy also that a wide distribution is positively related to national income, as measured by GDP per capita with a .59 correlation.

So, two slightly different patterns emerge: on the one hand, countries such as Spain, Italy, Ireland and Poland have comparatively low mean scores, and many low-skilled and few high-skilled adults; whereas Anglo-Saxon countries, such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia, on the other hand, have a more average mean score, but many low- and many high-skilled adults,  resulting in a large discrepancy between both ends of the distribution. In both groups of countries the skills distribution is related to high social inequality.

A completely different pattern can be seen in the Nordic countries, the Flemish Community in Belgium and the Netherlands: these countries combine low social inequality with a skills distribution profile characterised by an average width, a comparatively high mean, few low-skilled and many high-skilled adults.

At the end of the day what stands out is that a large share of low-skilled adults is associated with a high income inequality. It is not a large skills gap between the low- and high-skilled which seems to be related to high social inequality, but the size of the low-skilled population. The smartest skills strategy a country can develop to improve social inequality is to upgrade the skills of low-skilled adults.

Links:
How closely is the distribution of skills related to countries’ overall level of social inequality and economic prosperity? OECD paper by Dirk Van Damme on New Approaches to Economic Challenges
Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC)
OECD Skills Outlook 2013: First Results from the Survey of Adult Skills
Chart source: © OECD