Shared challenges in reforming education systems: are we getting it right?

by Beatriz Pont,
Senior Analyst, Directorate for Education and Skills

Let’s be honest, implementing ambitious reforms in education is not simple. Change takes time, often longer than a politician’s 4 year term, and they may face conflicting priorities or even lack evidence on what would work best. More than 12% of government expenditure is invested in education to improve results and enable citizens to benefit from good education systems. Still, 21.5% of 15 year olds don’t reach the minimum level of skills required to function in today’s societies.  The new OECD book Education Policy Outlook 2015: Making Reforms Happen looks into more than 450 education reforms adopted across OECD countries during the past 7 years.

Written to help policy makers with policy options and country examples, it shows trends and lessons that can contribute to make a difference in their reform efforts. Countries share common challenges and are defining policies accordingly: targeting inequality and ensuring completion and effective transitions into tertiary or the labour market, strengthening the delivery of education in schools, using data for accountability and improvement, and steering and implementing policy effectively.

Reviewing reforms implemented shows that many countries are using education as a way out of the crisis: numerous reforms focus on preparing students for the future, especially in vocational education and training and tertiary education. Reforms are also prioritising the quality of teachers and teaching, with almost 1 in 4 reforms in this area. Investing in supporting disadvantaged students and schools is at the heart of many reforms. In critical times like today, we need to invest to make sure that we deliver the best possible education for our children. They are our future.

Good reforms are not only about design. They are about making sure that policies are well implemented and that they have an impact where needed the most. Regrettably, from our study, only 1 in 10 reforms are reported as having evaluations. And we know that there are a number of key issues for success in making reforms happen: adapt the type of reform to respond to the concrete challenges, focus on the classroom and the learning and not on processes, focus on developing capacity of teachers and leaders, engage stakeholders from early on, and make reforms sustainable for the longer term.

Reforms are not just about strategies, white papers and regulations; they must be transformed into better outcomes for our youth and our future. 

Review and compare countries on the Data Viz 

Links:

Press release: Success of education reforms threatened by lack of oversight, says OECD

Education Policy Outlook

Country profiles

Work on Vocational Education and Training (VET)

PISA 2012 Findings

Trends Shaping Education 2013

Addressing inequities in the Slovak Republic through evaluation and assessment

by Claire Shewbridge
Analyst, Directorate for Education and Skills

It is taken for granted in OECD countries nowadays that the vast majority of children and young people have access to education, regardless of their wealth or background. However, despite this great achievement, in many countries, the socio-economic background of children will still have a large impact on how well they succeed at school.

In the Slovak Republic, there are considerable equity challenges, and a very clear link between students’ socio-economic background and their educational achievement. The educational differences between rural areas and cities are significant, regional disparities are more pronounced than in other OECD countries, and the educational outcomes of the Roma minority are particularly poor. This has a lasting impact on a child’s life, as the reduced risk of unemployment for Slovak men and women with upper secondary education is particularly strong when compared internationally. These regional challenges and the important role that education plays in promoting a more inclusive growth are also underlined in the OECD Economic Survey launched today by OECD's Secretary-General in Bratislava.

An essential tool to help the Slovak Republic address this inequity is an effective evaluation and assessment system that will help them to monitor teaching and learning, set educational goals, and improve practice and outcomes. This has been the focus of the OECD’s Review of Evaluation and Assessment in Education, of which the Slovak Republic Review is the final publication.

To improve the evaluation and assessment system in the Slovak Republic, a strategic approach is needed, with the clarification of long-term goals for schooling, and capacity building at the national level so that results from evaluation and assessment feed into policies for school system improvement.

The Slovak Republic has made a positive move by strengthening the objectivity of examinations at the end of upper secondary schooling (Maturita) and developing national assessments in Year 9 that help embed the competency-based national curriculum. Next week, also, children in selected primary schools will sit a new assessment in Year 5.

To keep moving forward, the entire school community needs to be empowered to get involved, from parents associations, to students associations, to teachers associations. An important part of this is ensuring that teachers and school leaders have access to adequate professional development. With strategic national leadership, and meaningful community feedback, positive changes can be driven forward so that all students, regardless of their background, will have the opportunity to succeed.

Links:
OECD Reviews of Evaluation and Assessment in Education: Slovak Republic
OECD Press Release: Economic activity is accelerating in the Slovak Republic, OECD says 
OECD Review on Evaluation and Assessment Frameworks for Improving School Outcomes
Synergies for Better Learning: An International Perspective on Evaluation and Assessment
Photo credit: © iQoncept - Fotolia.com 

Going for excellence: evaluation and assessment in Dutch schools

by Deborah Nusche
Policy Analyst,  Early Childhood and Schools Division, Directorate for Education

Dutch education is at a turning point. Although the Dutch education system

has made progress on many fronts and has a high standing on international assessments, there is a general appreciation that the system must continue to improve and strive for the next level.

The nature of that next level, however, has not yet been specified.

According to various groups interviewed as part of an OECD Review published today, it could mean further improving the country’s standing on international assessments, with particular focus on top performers; or enhancing general academic achievement and responding better to the learning needs of different student groups; or turning attention to “21st century skills” such as creativity, collaboration and ICT literacy.

The Dutch government has launched a general policy emphasising excellence in education. This includes a focus on providing better support to gifted and talented students and stimulating schools to aim for higher levels of achievement. For example, school inspection visits are becoming more differentiated to help schools with average and good results to further improve towards excellence. Teacher professionalism, and teachers’
capacity for “results-oriented work”, are being promoted as key elements in achieving excellence in education. Recent laws on student assessment make it mandatory for primary schools to implement regular student monitoring systems and a standardised end-of-primary test.

The Dutch government invited the OECD to visit the Netherlands and review how current evaluation and assessment approaches contribute to improving teaching and learning in Dutch schools. The OECD review team found that in many ways evaluation and assessment in Dutch schools are in line with the principles identified by the OECD to develop an effective evaluation and assessment framework. Central instruments for student assessment, school evaluation and education system monitoring are highly developed, and schools are responsible for assuring their own quality. The involvement and cooperation of multiple stakeholders has resulted in a comprehensive and balanced approach to evaluation and assessment, producing ample information and feedback for actors at all levels of the system.

Going forward, the Netherlands needs to ensure that the available evaluation and assessment results are effectively used for improvement in all schools, including in those that are already achieving basic quality. An overarching strategy for evaluation and assessment in the Netherlands could help map out the existing instruments, clarify responsibilities and point to adequate uses of evaluation and assessment results. Teachers, school leaders and governing boards would benefit from enhanced training to interpret and use the information generated by evaluation and assessment for improvements at the school and classroom level. Effective appraisal and feedback systems for school professionals, linked to professional development, can play a key role in building such capacity. Innovative approaches to school evaluation will further contribute to stimulating reflective practice and excellence in schooling.

If evaluation and assessment are to be tools for improving learning rather than the drivers of education in the Netherlands, the system also needs to build consensus on education goals for future generations. What does excellence mean for Dutch schools in the mid-21st century? Are schools sufficiently focused on valued learning goals such as problem-solving, collaboration, ICT literacy and creative thinking? How can evaluation and assessment support rather than stifle innovative teaching and learning? Greater clarity on national learning goals for the mid-21st century will help inform reflection and dialogue on how evaluation and assessment should evolve in order to support a future-oriented education system.

Links:
OECD Reviews of Evaluation and Assessment in Education: Netherlands:
Country Review
Main Conclusions
Summary
For more on OECD Reviews on Evaluation and Assessment Frameworks for Improving School Outcomes: www.oecd.org/edu/evaluationpolicy 
Photo credit: © Fotolia

A new direction for education reform in China

by Yan Wang, Ph.D
National Institute for Education Sciences, Beijing

China has worked hard to expand access and improve the quality of education by trying many alternative approaches to educate more people, both by drawing on the experiences of other countries or retrieving historical practices. The progress to date has been tremendous, with nine-year basic education universalised, mass higher education attained, and youth and adult illiteracy eradicated. The recent 3rd plenary session of the 18th Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee announced a number of strategies to address social and economic challenges faced by China. These strategies will, among other things, frame the future direction of Chinese education. The purpose of the new reforms is not only to pursue further development, but also address the problems arising from the rapid changes made over the last two decades.

Historically, 3rd plenary sessions have been milestones of major political, economic and social reforms since China embarked on the reforms that opened up the economy in 1978. The aim then was to inject vigor into a system that had almost come to a halt after the devastating Cultural Revolution.  But the reform strategies adopted by the 2013 plenary are quite different from the 1978 reforms, as they mark two developmental stages with different challenges. The new policies have called for rebuilding the education system and encouraging bold experimentation in education to boost economic growth in three main areas:

Equity: As in other sectors, the rapid development of education over the past three decades has led in many cases to severe inequities both within provinces and across provinces. The equity reform involves several strategies for dealing with this problem, among which are the following: 1) support hard-to-reach or disadvantaged students with more financial support, 2)  standardise public schools (including abolishing so-called key schools or key classes by removing their resource privileges) and 3) facilitate mobility of teachers and principals among different types of schools as well as sharing of resources among different areas and schools by means of information technology.

Gaokao (college entrance examination): which has long been regarded as a bottleneck of education reforms aimed at quality in China. When Gaokao was resumed 30 years ago, it was designed as a unified examination to screen and select the most talented students for admission into higher education.  Because it was the same examination for all, and was objectively scored, it was seen as fair and equitable by everyone. But the exams, though rigorous and fair, do not measure the kinds of skills required by a modern economy. The reforms essentially comprise three elements: 1) replace once-and-for-all the college entrance examination system with a more comprehensive learning assessment that incorporates: a) a colleague entrance examination with fewer subjects and more choice of examinations at different times of the year, b) competency-based student learning performance assessment and c) tests organised by the universities and colleges.  (one hopes that this could be done in the near future); 2) separate university admissions from college entrance examinations, to give more autonomy to universities and colleges to identify students of different capabilities and 3) create more learning pathways among regular tertiary institutions, vocational institutions and adult tertiary schools.

Reduce the bureaucratic control of education by government: The reform will disentangle the responsibilities of administration, sponsorship (school management) and evaluation. It is intended to delegate more power to provincial government, give more autonomy to educational institutions and give more control over education evaluation and monitoring to professional organisations. Another strategy that merits a mention is to promote public-private partnerships such as those that would encourage involvement of the private sector in education sponsorship.

While earlier education reforms have put the focus on the development of schools and teachers, these reforms focus on traditional cultural values, like ethics and personal health and fitness, on the one hand, and the need to produce students who are more creative and innovative on the other.  This does not appear to be in any way a rejection of the past priorities, but rather a recognition that they are well on the say to being achieved and it is time to move on to new frontiers.

Links:
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?
Learning in rural China: The challenges for teachers
Learning in rural China: The challenges for students

Photo credit: Chinese students @ Shutterstock

It’s PISA time again. So?

by Marilyn Achiron 
Editor, Directorate for Education and Skills

Results from the most recent round of PISA surveys are scheduled for release in less than one month (3 December). Why should you care?

For lots of reasons, really. This month’s PISA in Focus highlights a few. For  example, the recently published Survey of Adult Skills finds a close link between countries’ performance in the different rounds of PISA and the literacy and numeracy proficiency of adults of the corresponding age group later on. This is an important connection because the Survey of Adult Skills reveals that highly skilled adults are twice as likely to be employed and almost three times more likely to earn an above-median salary than poorly skilled adults. In other words, poor skills severely limit people’s access to better-paying and more rewarding jobs. Highly skilled people are also more likely to volunteer, see themselves as actors rather than as objects of political processes, and are more likely to trust others. And many – if not most – of these skills are acquired at school.

“Strong performers” in education, as identified by PISA 2009, are those countries and economies that are more successful at imparting those skills to their students than others. They -- Canada, Finland, Hong Kong-China, Japan, Korea, New Zealand and Shanghai-China -- are found in diverse regions, with different cultures and traditions, and are at different stages of development. But PISA finds that they all share a few common traits: a belief in the potential of all their students, strong political will, and the capacity of policy makers, educators, students and their families to make sustained and concerted efforts towards improvement.

Success in PISA is only partly about test scores. In fact, the most successful school systems are those that not only perform well, but ensure that every student has the chance to fulfil his or her potential. For example, Canada, Estonia, Finland, Hong Kong-China, Iceland, Korea and Liechtenstein all showed above-average performance in reading in 2009 and are places where socio-economic status has less impact on performance than it does in other countries.

As a regularly recurring survey, PISA can also track progress over time. Of the 26 countries with comparable information between 2000 and 2009, half – namely Albania, Brazil, Chile, Germany, Hungary, Indonesia, Israel, Korea, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Peru, Poland and Portugal – improved their reading performance during the period. The fact that such a diverse group of countries succeeded in raising the level of their students’ performance in reading is another indication that any country can improve, irrespective of its culture, traditions, level of development or initial level of skills.

Since its first round in 2000, PISA has become the international standard for measuring the quality, equity and efficiency of school systems. And because PISA shows that improvement is possible for all, governments and educators, students and parents around the world can learn from each other to build more effective and efficient school systems. In an increasingly knowledge-based economy, and where public budgets are tight, there is little that is more important.

If you’re still unsure about why you should care about PISA results, think of your child’s future, your own abilities at school or at work, and your country’s capacity to compete in a rapidly changing global economy. You’ll find the answers there.

Links:
For more information on PISA: www.oecd.org/pisa/
PISA in Focus No.34: Who are the strong performers and successful reformers in education?
Photo credit: Pencil ladder © Shutterstock

Balancing Trust and Accountability

by Tracey Burns
Analyst and Project Leader, Innovation and Measuring Progress Division, Directorate for Education and Skills

Strengthening accountability is one of the key ways to improve the quality of an education system. Yet reform processes that emphasize strong evaluation and assessment regimes can be misunderstood as controlling or demonstrating a lack of trust: in teachers, in students, and in the system. What is the best way to maintain and build trust while improving accountability?

A recently released Governing Complex Education Systems (GCES) case study looks at this issue. Entitled Balancing Trust and Accountability? The Assessment for Learning Programme in Norway, the report explores the implementation strategies used to enhance formative assessment in Norwegian schools. The reform aimed at helping school leaders and teachers integrate formative assessment into their day-to- day teaching practice and schools.

In Norway there is a strong sense of trust in the system. However, when the system relies wholly on trust and has few incentives (or sanctions) for the actors, long-term implementation of policy initiatives can become problematic in the face of resistance.

In the last several years Norway has been one of many OECD countries working to build a culture of assessment across the entire system. In order to achieve this, governments have to strike the right balance between providing clear directions and goals on the one hand, and allowing for freedom of innovation and creativity in practice on the other. This is true for teachers and other stakeholders as well: trust in local authorities, for example, is also required for the effective functioning of the system.

Effective formative assessment, like teaching, is based on a combination of factors and there is no single recipe for success. However in order to learn new practices, teachers are just like the rest of us – they need guidance and support. In this case, the Norwegian authorities have provided workshops, online tools, and peer learning networks to help facilitate the process. But it is not easy – despite the support put in place, the majority of the teachers interviewed for the case study struggled with understanding what would be considered “correct” practice.

So what can be done? Prepare the ground. Don’t underestimate the importance of clear goals and communication. And recognize the power of networks. In this case study, the research team found that successful implementation of the programme was enhanced by:

• strong leadership skills and thorough knowledge of the content of the programme on the part of the municipalities;
• clear communication between governance levels and a high degree of trust between stakeholders;
•  a solid understanding of the programme goals, including integrating these goals within the broader aims of educational policy and school practice; 
• the establishment of learning networks between schools to aid the exchange of knowledge and opportunities for peer learning. 

One final note: This case study addresses the process of reform and the dynamics of change in a large-scale implementation of policy. In this context, the importance of strategic planning and alignment of goals between governance levels cannot be understated. There is a danger of too much, too soon – smaller municipalities in particular struggle with a continual stream of policy changes and prioritising activities. Meaningful change takes time, and embedding new behaviours into practice requires thoughtful and deliberate planning and feedback.

Education systems have never been easy to manage. Today it is abundantly clear that processes of reform cannot be understood as top-down unilateral delivery chains and treated as systems that engineer processes. Rather, they require reappraisal, fine-tuning, responsiveness and sometimes new structures of collaboration, participation and networking. And above all, trust must be nurtured, for it is hard to gain and easy to lose. As the old adage says, trust “arrives on foot and leaves on horseback”.

Links: 
OECD'S Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI)
Governing Complex Education Systems (GCES)
OECD Review of Evaluation and Assessment for Improving School Outcomes
OECD Working Paper: Stakeholders and Multiple School Accountability
Photo credit:Symbol Scales is made of stones of various shapes/@ Shutterstock

A new old topic, reloaded

by Mihaylo Milovanovitch

Policy Analyst, Non-Member Economies, Directorate for Education

In a recent OECD blog entry for the European Association for International Education, studying in the “good old times” has been likened to a nice air trip. One would purchase a ticket, board a plane and enjoy a flight to a new and better place. On the way one would fly over and see new things, earn miles and acquire a higher status.

The same blog suggests that things are different today as in many of the countries that are in the middle of a “gold rush” to higher education, the academic planes stay grounded. Outdated systems of admission to university, of assessment and financial support bend under the weight of increasing student numbers and diversity and fail to provide the right answers to three key questions: What do students want? Why do they study? Do they study what they want?

Wrong answers to these questions can be detrimental to institutional integrity. If restrictive and/or misleading access policies make students choose whatever field of study they can get in to, how likely is it that they will care for academic rigour and integrity? If access is not a problem, but public support is spread thinly among a large student population and students have to work full time to sustain themselves, at the end of the day how much time and motivation will they have to fight for transparency and participation in the governance of their higher education institutions? If assessment is not transparent and examiners are the sole masters over questions of academic survival and financial support, what are the chances that students will dare to hold their professors accountable for anything?

The story points to an obvious conclusion. If tertiary institutions do not become better at detecting and responding to student needs and aptitudes, their academic integrity may suffer and they could ultimately pay with their (hard earned) reputation.  A possibly less obvious, but equally important point is that success in fighting malpractice in education generally depends not only on setting and enforcing appropriate rules, but also on a sound understanding of the origins of the problem, and on appropriate action to address these origins.

It is encouraging to see that the topic of integrity and corruption in education is having a “comeback”, driven by major players in the field of anti-corruption advocacy and research, such as Transparency International (TI). It is even more encouraging to discover that the discussion has become more nuanced, vocal, sophisticated and convincing than before and that it promotes a more systemic approach. This year’s edition of TI’s Global Corruption Report is devoted to corruption in education. It invests an extra effort to cover all aspects of the problem and to capture and reproduce the global state of affairs in dealing with it from the perspective of practitioners, researchers and stakeholders, including the OECD with its integrity of education systems (INTES) methodology. Let us hope that the readers of the Report will be as enthusiastic about it as its contributors, and that the fight for more integrity in education will become everybody’s responsibility, at last.

Links:
Global Corruption Report
Public Sector Integrity Reviews
Bribery in international business
Photo credit: Closeup of an old book lying on white ground @shutterstock

Who are the all-round top students?

by Marilyn Achiron

Editor, Directorate for Education and Skills

Summer in the northern hemisphere is barely over and we’re already talking about doing well in school? Not only are we talking about doing well in school, we’re talking about doing verywell in school – and in all of the three subjects that PISA assesses: reading, mathematics and science. 

As this month’s PISA in Focus explains, all-rounders – students who attain proficiency Level 5 or 6 in all three assessment subjects – are rare: only 4.1% of 15-year-old students meet this high standard. Why do – or should – countries care about the number of all-rounders they produce? Knowing the proportion of students who excel in these three subjects helps countries to determine the depth of their future talent pool, which has significant implications for a country’s ability to compete and grow in an increasingly information-based global economy.

On average across OECD countries, 16.3% of students are top performers in at least one of the subject areas of science, mathematics or reading. But just because a student is a top performer in one subject does not necessarily mean that the student excels in all subjects. In Switzerland, for example, nearly one in four students is a top performer in mathematics, but only about one in 12 is a top performer in reading and one in ten is a top performer in science. The same is true for many Southeast Asian countries and economies, notably Hong Kong-China, Korea, Macao-China, Shanghai-China, Singapore and Chinese Taipei, where the likelihood of finding students who score at Level 5 or 6 in mathematics is considerably greater than that of finding students who score at that level in reading or science.

All-rounders are found in many countries and economies, but the proportion of these students varies considerably across school systems. For example, Shanghai-China has the largest share of all-rounders – 14.6% of 15-year-old students – followed by Singapore (12.3%); but fewer than 1% of students in Chile, Mexico, Turkey and 21 other countries and economies meet the criteria for being “all-rounders”. Yet all-rounders are found nearly equally among boys (3.8%) as among girls (4.4%).

What is somewhat surprising is that, among countries with similar mean scores in PISA, there are notable differences in the percentage of academic all-rounders. For example, Korea and Singapore score about the same in mathematics, reading and science; but while 12% of students in Singapore are all-rounders, only 7% of students in Korea are. This means that even the best-performing school systems are not equally capable of producing top performers in all subjects.

But it’s something to aspire to, even in late August.

For more information on PISA: www.oecd.org/pisa/
PISA in Focus No. 31: Who are the academic all-rounders?
Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education
OECD work on Skills
 Photo credit: Climbing team struggle to the summit of a challenging rock mountain  / @Shutterstock

What a tangled web we weave: strategies for school improvement

by Harald Wilkoszewski
Analyst, Innovation and Measuring Progress Division, Directorate for Education and Skills

The best education possible for our children – this is what all education systems strive for. But what can policy makers do when schools become weak, sometimes too weak, to fulfil their purpose? Especially in highly decentralised systems, where schools enjoy high levels of autonomy, policy interventions to help improve the learning situations for students can be particularly difficult to implement.

A new case study on The Netherlands for the OECD project “Governing Complex Education Systems (GCES)” shows that a timely, risk-based assessment of schools can help to significantly lower the number of weak schools. The case study also illustrates that governing is in the details, as the reform had some undesired effects. But let’s look at the good news first.

In 2009, 120 Dutch schools were underperforming. In 2011 this number decreased to less than 100, a significant drop of over 16%. The Dutch school inspectorate, traditionally responsible for school quality, achieved this by flagging schools that showed low indicators on a number of outputs as “weak” or “very weak”. These labels mean that unless these schools change radically, they run the risk of failing – being closed down.

Schools are not, however, left alone with this message: The inspectorate puts in place a range of supporting measures such as tailor-made recommendations or an intensive exchange with schools boards.

While the numbers speak for the success of this reform, the new GCES case study “Coping with very weak primary schools” also shows that schools react quite differently to being labelled “weak” or “very weak”. Most school communities take it as a wake-up call and are encouraged to improve, but some become discouraged and do not manage to turn the wheel around.

Whereas schools that react positively then end up in a virtuous cycle of improvement, schools that react negatively are stuck in a vicious circle: alerted parents take their children out of the labelled school, other parents follow the example, and the number of students decreases dramatically. This forces the school to merge several school grades into one classroom, putting even more stress on the teachers. In this difficult situation, performance improvements are hard to achieve and school closure becomes a likely scenario.

In order to avoid such undesired effects, the case study recommends that decision makers adapt their mindsets, from a linear perspective of cause and consequence, to a more dynamic view. This will help them take a second look at their existing repertoire and analyse how their current set of policy interventions works in a complex system.

Ultimately, this adaptive view may prove beneficial in other education policy contexts as well because it can:

• Lead to new insights into how and why some interventions seem to work surprisingly well;
• Show why some methods work less well and identify previously unnoticed, positive effects;
• Show that some interventions do not work at all and that the capital that goes into them may be better invested in other areas of the system;
• Put some interventions on the radar that come from other areas, other policy domains that may be beneficial to very weak schools;
• Be an important element in developing smarter interventions in multi-level systems.

Links:
OECD'S Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI)
Governing Complex Education Systems (GCES)
Photo credit: Young girl excited that she has reached the top of the giant/ Shutterstock

Evaluation and assessment is for everyone

by Deborah Nusche and Claire Shewbridge
Analysts, Directorate for Education and Skills

Some may ask if all the time, money and effort invested in evaluation and assessment is worth it. The terms evaluation and assessment may strike fear into the hearts of some students, teachers and parents. Are they not just a way to control and constrain what goes in the classroom? Is this just not more unnecessary work for us? What on earth do they have to do with student learning?

A three-year comprehensive review of evaluation and assessment approaches around the world was brought to its grand finale in Oslo last week. The idea of the international meeting was for the OECD to put its own advice into practice: after conducting a major review of policies, do not put the results on a shelf but put them to good use. Bring stakeholders together, discuss the results of the evaluation exercise, and identify strategies to go forward. Already, over the past three years, countries that were reviewed by the OECD have done this on a national level and the results have been pretty impressive.

The main purpose of the OECD’s review was to investigate how these could be embedded in teaching and learning processes themselves, to improve student learning and give helpful information for all those involved:

Students need to be clear about what they are aiming to learn and how they can evaluate their own progress. Engaging students as active participants in assessment will help them develop capabilities in analysing their own learning and becoming self-directed learners. The representative of the European School Student Unions said it very clearly at the conference: Students do not want to be ‘passive objects’ of evaluation and assessment, they want to be actively involved, not just in their own assessment, but also in the evaluation of their teachers and schools.

Teachers also need assessment information that is reliable and consistent across schools in order to understand student strengths and weaknesses in relation to expected standards, to target future teaching and improve classroom instruction. They need feedback on their own performance to guide their professional and career development, and they should contribute to the self-evaluation of their schools.

School leaders can use school self-evaluation processes to steer whole-school improvement and provide accountability information to their communities, employers and the educational administration.

Parents typically want to know how their children are doing and how schools are helping them achieve. Providing evaluation and assessment information to parents is key to building strong school-home partnerships and can facilitate school choice.

Policy makers need aggregated information to monitor the performance of schools and education systems and ensure that national education goals are met and society at large also needs credentials about the quality of education and the achievement of standards in the education system.

Bringing the pieces together 
But if so many actors within the education system are involved in designing and using assessment and evaluation, is there not a risk that too many cooks spoil the broth? Most countries have a whole range of provisions for student assessment, teacher appraisal and school evaluation that have developed quite independently of each other. A key concern is to bring all these pieces together in a coherent framework to create synergies for learning. The OECD Review gives some ideas on how to do so:

• Take a comprehensive approach: All the components of assessment and evaluation – student assessment, teacher appraisal, school evaluation, school leader appraisal and education system evaluation - should form a coherent whole. This will generate synergies, avoid duplication and prevent inconsistency of objectives.
• Align evaluation and assessment with educational goals: Evaluation and assessment should align with the principles embedded in educational goals. 
• Focus on improving classroom practices: To optimise the potential of evaluation and assessment to improve what is at the heart of education – student learning – policy makers should promote the regular use of evaluation and assessment results for improvements in the classroom.
• Build consensus: Ensure that all the stakeholders are involved early and understand the benefits. 
• Place students at the centre: Students should be fully engaged with their learning and empowered to assess their own progress. The development of critical thinking and social competencies should also be monitored.

Links:
OECD Review on Evaluation and Assessment Frameworks for Improving School Outcomes
Synergies for Better Learning: An International Perspective on Evaluation and Assessment
Photo credit: © AKS - Fotolia.com

A class act: giving teachers feedback

by Kristen Weatherby
Senior Analyst, Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS)

When I think back on my first experiences as a student teacher of English language and literature to 13- and 14-year-olds, I don’t really remember the successes; I am not sure there were many during my teaching practice. Rather, I am reminded of the more colourful episodes of classroom management and student behaviour that seemed to occur all too frequently. For example, there was the time I looked up from reading to the class to see one student staring back with a green mustache and eyebrows. Another time one student jumped up from his desk and threw another student’s books out the window before I could blink. And then there were the countless times that I had to take away combs, brushes and makeup from both girls and boys in an effort to turn my classroom from a beauty salon into a place of learning. Needless to say, in these moments I didn’t feel like a very effective teacher.

Little did I know it at the time, but I was not alone in feeling a bit like a failure due to a less-than-ideal classroom climate. The newest Teaching in Focus brief, “How can teacher feedback be used to improve the classroom disciplinary climate?” discusses how providing teachers more feedback to improve their classroom’s disciplinary climate can have a positive effect on their sense of mastery of the situation, what is known as self-efficacy. The OECD’s  Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) measures classroom disciplinary climate by the amount of time it takes to ready students for a lesson, the number of student interruptions, and the amount of noise in the classroom, among other factors. TALIS data shows that, on average, 13% of a typical class’s teaching and learning time is lost to keeping order.

TALIS data also shows that most teachers are not receiving the kind of feedback that helps them to improve their classroom disciplinary practice. As a result,  teachers are left feeling much as I did as a new teacher – not very effective. In fact, this is supported by the TALIS data, which indicates a relationship between teacher self-efficacy and classroom disciplinary climate. Teachers’ self-efficacy can have a significant impact on what goes on in the classroom, as it indicates not only aspects of productivity but also how teachers act in class. And teachers who report poor classroom discipline also report lower levels of self-efficacy.

Policymakers, union leaders, and teachers will be meeting next week in Amsterdam for the third International Summit on the Teaching Profession. This year’s topic is teacher evaluation and professional standards. Constructive feedback – as part of formal or informal teacher appraisal – could help teachers to improve their classroom disciplinary climate. TALIS 2008 results suggest that individualised feedback that considers the teachers’ characteristics, competencies, and individual classrooms, would be most helpful in improving classroom disciplinary climate and teacher self-efficacy. It undoubtedly would have helped me to chalk up a few successes during those early days in front of the class.

Watch this space for more blogs related to the Teachers’ Summit. We’ll also be tweeting live from the Summit. Follow the summit on twitter: #ISTP2013

Links:

For more on the OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey:www.oecd.org/edu/talis
Teaching in Focus: How can teacher feedback be used to improve the classroom disciplinary climate?
Third annual International Summit on the Teaching Profession, 13-14 March 2013, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Teachers for the 21st Century: Using Evaluation to Improve Teaching
Follow TALIS and Kristen Weatherby @Kristen_Talis
Photo credit: Positive feedback/Shutterstock