Higher level vocational education and training (VET) programmes are facing rapid change and intensifying challenges. What type of training is needed to meet the needs of changing economies? How should the programmes be funded? How should they be linked to academic and university programmes? How can employers and unions be engaged? The country reports in this series look at these and other questions. They form part of Skills beyond School, the OECD policy review of postsecondary vocational education and training. This report reviews vocational education and training systems in Costa Rica.
How can countries prepare teachers to face the diverse challenges in today´s schools? The OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) helps answer this question by asking teachers and school leaders about their working conditions and the learning environments at their schools. TALIS aims to provide valid, timely and comparable information to help countries review and define policies for developing a high-quality teaching profession. It is an opportunity for teachers and school leaders to provide input into educational policy analysis and development in key areas. This report presents the results of the second cycle of the TALIS survey conducted in 2013.
Education at a Glance 2013: Highlights summarises the OECD's flagship compendium of education statistics, Education at a Glance. It provides easily accessible data on key topics in education today, including:- Education levels and student numbers: How far have adults studied, and how does early childhood education affect student performance later on?- Higher education and work: How many young people graduate from tertiary education, and how easily do they enter the world of work?- Economic and social benefits of education: How does education affect people's job prospects, and what is its impact on incomes?- Paying for education: What share of public spending goes on education, and what is the role of private spending?- The school environment: How many hours do teachers work, and how does class size vary?
Higher level vocational education and training (VET) programmes are facing rapid change and intensifying challenges. What type of training is needed to meet the needs of changing economies? How should the programmes be funded? How should they be linked to academic and university programmes? How can employers and unions be engaged? This report synthesises the findings of the series of country reports done on skills beyond school.
While enrolment in tertiary education has increased dramatically over the past decades, many university-aged students do not enrol, nor do they expect to earn a university degree. While it is important to promote high expectations for further education, it is equally important to ensure that students' expectations are well-aligned with their actual abilities. Grade Expectations: How Marks and Education Policies Shape Students' Ambitions reveals some of the factors that influence students' thinking about further education. The report also suggests what teachers and education policy makers can do to ensure that more students have the skills, as well as the motivation, to succeed in higher education.
In 2009, students in 21 PISA-participating countries and economies were asked about their expected educational attainment. An analysis of PISA data finds that students who expect to earn a university degree show significantly better performance in math and reading when compared to students who do not expect to earn such a university degree. However, performance is only one of the factors that determine expectations.
What does the OECD have to say about the state of education today? What are the main OECD messages on early childhood education, teacher policies and tertiary education? What about student performance, educational spending and equity in education? OECD work on these important education topics and others have been brought together in a single accessible source updating the first edition of Education Today which came out in March 2009.
This book uses PISA data to show that a substantial proportion of students in OECD countries now attend schools that have high degrees of autonomy in different areas of decision making. But effective school autonomy depends on effective leaders, including system leaders, principals, teacher leaders, senior teachers, and head teachers, as well as strong support systems. That, in turn, requires well-distributed leadership, new types of training and development for school leaders, and appropriate support and incentives.
How can student assessment, teacher appraisal, school evaluation and system evaluation bring about real gains in performance across a country´s school system? This review report for the Netherlands provides, from an international perspective, an independent analysis of major issues facing the Dutch evaluation and assessment framework in education, current policy initiatives and possible future approaches. This series forms part of the OECD Review on Evaluation and Assessment Frameworks for Improving School Outcomes.
Do teachers innovate? Do they try different pedagogical approaches? Are practices within classrooms and educational organisations changing? And to what extent can change be linked to improvements? A measurement agenda is essential to an innovation and improvement strategy in education. Measuring Innovation in Educationoffers new perspectives on addressing the need for such measurement.
This book´s first objective is informative: it gives readers new international comparative information about innovation in education compared to other sectors. And it documents change in a variety of dimensions of school practices between 1999 and 2011. Its second objective is methodological: it assesses two approaches to capturing the extent and type of innovation occurring within and across education systems. The third objective is exploratory: this book showcases a large-scale pilot that presents over 200 measures of innovation in education using existing international data. Last but not least, the fourth objective is prospective: this report proposes new approaches to measuring innovation in education in the future.
This book is the beginning of a new journey: it calls for innovations in the field of measurement - and not just of education.
Education at a Glance 2014: Highlights summarises the OECD's flagship compendium of education statistics, Education at a Glance. It provides easily accessible data on key topics in education today, including:
- Education levels and student numbers: How far have adults studied, and how does early childhood education affect student performance later on?
- Higher education and work: How many young people graduate from tertiary education, and how easily do they enter the world of work?
- Economic and social benefits of education: How does education affect people's job prospects, and what is its impact on incomes?
- Paying for education: What share of public spending goes on education, and what is the role of private spending?
- The school environment: How many hours do teachers work, and how does class size vary?
Education at a Glance: OECD Indicators is the authoritative source for accurate and relevant information on the state of education around the world. It provides data on the structure, finances, and performance of education systems in the OECD's 34 member countries, as well as a number of partner countries.
Most parents know instinctively that spending more time with their children and being actively involved in their education will give their children a good head-start in life. But since most parents have to juggle competing demands at work and home, there never seems to be enough time or they feel ill-equipped to help.
This book from OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) has some good news for concerned parents: it does not require a Ph.D or unlimited hours for parents to make a difference in their children's education. In fact, many parent-child activities that are associated with better reading performance among students involve relatively little time and no specialised knowledge. What these activities do demand is genuine interest and active engagement.
This book provides, from an international perspective, an independent analysis of major issues facing the educational evaluation and assessment framework, current policy initiatives, and possible future approaches in Mexico.
Drawing on relevant international research, including information from experts' presentations and papers given at the December 2008 Joint Conference between the OECD and the Government of Mexico, this book sets out good practice in the design and implementation of incentive systems for teachers. With this aim in mind, the book provides analysis and discussion of the design and implementation of incentive systems for teachers as well as guidance on what should be rewarded and how it should it be measured, who should be rewarded, how they should they be rewarded and how policies should be developed and implemented to ensure stakeholder engagement and commitment.
This new biennial publication presents the latest available information on 26 major current trends in education, grouped in 9 broad themes (ageing, global challenges, the new economic landscape, work and jobs, the learning society, ICT, citizenship and the state, social connections and values, and sustainable affluence). For each trend, there is a two-page spread, containing a short introduction, two figures with accompanying text followed by three key questions about the impact of the trend on the future of education. A dynamic link (StatLink) is provided for each figure, which directs the user to a web page where the corresponding data are available in Excel®.
US President Obama has launched one of the world's most ambitious education reform agendas. Under the heading «Race to the Top», this agenda encourages US states to adopt internationally benchmarked standards and assessments that prepare students for success in college and the workplace: recruit, develop, reward, and retain effective teachers and principals; build data systems that measure student success; and inform teachers and principals how they can improve their practices and turn around their lowest-performing schools.
But what does the «top» look like internationally? How have the countries at the top managed to achieve sustained high performance or to significantly improve their performance? The OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) provides the world's most extensive and rigorous set of international surveys assessing the knowledge and skills of secondary school students. This volume combines an analysis of PISA with a description of the policies and practices of those education systems that are close to the top or advancing rapidly, in order to offer insights for policy from their reform trajectories.
The 2009 edition of Education at a Glance: OECD Indicators enables countries to see themselves in the light of other countries' performance. It provides a rich, comparable and up-to-date array of indicators on the performance of education systems and represents the consensus of professional thinking on how to measure the current state of education internationally.
The indicators look at who participates in education, what is spent on it and how education systems operate and at the results achieved. The latter includes indicators on a wide range of outcomes, from comparisons of students' performance in key subject areas to the impact of education on earnings and on adults' chances of employment. New material in this edition includes first results from the OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) on teacher practices as well as teacher appraisal and feedback; an analysis of the social benefits of education; information on long-term unemployment and involuntary part-time work among young adults; a review of trends in attainment; data on the incentives to invest in education which show the benefits of education in dollar amount across OECD countries; and a picture of excellence in education for 15-year-olds, based on findings from the PISA study.
The ExcelTM spreadsheets used to create the tables and charts in this book are available via the StatLinks printed in this book. The tables and charts, as well as the complete OECD Online Education Database, are freely available via the OECD Education website at www.oecd.org/edu/eag2009.
A condensed version of this publication is also available: Highlights from Education at a Glance 2009.
Value-added estimates are a significant improvement upon measures of school performance currently used in most education systems across OECD countries. They provide a fundamentally more accurate and valuable quantitative basis for school improvement planning, policy development and for enacting effective school accountability arrangements. This groundbreaking report provides examples of best practices in value-added modeling for measuring school performance.