Key Competences in Europe: Opening Doors For Lifelong Learners Across the School Curriculum and Teacher Education

The aim of the study is to provide a comparative overview of policy and practice concerning the development and implementation of key competences in the education systems of the 27 Member States of the European Union. In particular, the study assesses the implementation of the 8 key competences contained in the European Reference Framework of Key Competences in primary and secondary schools across the EU as well as the extent to which initial and in-service education and training of teachers equips them with the skills and competences necessary to deliver key competences effectively.key competences, lifelong learning, cross-curricular, competence

Functional language & literacy in practice: a higher education music context

Currently most Higher Education (HE) and Vocational Education and Training (VET) courses do not specifically address functional literacy skills. A student could potentially pass the course, yet still be functionally illiterate. This paper is an attempt to consider what language and literacy issues might mean in practice in the context of Australian music higher education through investigating the role of reflective practice in music performance. A graduating music performance class at the Australian Institute of Music is employed as a case study to unpack the role of functional literacy in this context. Here, aligning cognitive processes with course development may avail opportunities for literacy skills to develop, but it still remains a question as to where such opportunities could exist within the broader education field. Regardless, the aim is to support content understanding by focusing on the nature and practices of academic reading and writing in all education environments

How Shanghai does it : insights and lessons from the highest-ranking education system in the world

This report, how Shanghai does it: insights and lessons from the highest-ranking education system in the world, presents an in-depth examination of how students in Shanghai achieved the highest scores in the areas of reading, science, and mathematics on a respected global assessment of 15-year-olds’ educational abilities. It documents and benchmarks key policies in Shanghai’s basic education, provides evidence on the extent to which these policies have been implemented in schools, and explores how these policies and their implementation have affected learning outcomes. The report uses the World Bank’s Systems Approach for Better Education Results (SABER) as an organizing framework to organize and benchmark policies. School-based surveys and other existing research are employed to shed light on educational impact and implementation. Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2012 data are used to analyze the variations in Shanghai students’ achievement and to examine the extent to which school variables may be associated with variation after accounting for family and student background. Shanghai designs professional development activities to be collaborative and to focus on instructional improvement. School principals are responsible for creating targeted teacher training plans based on each teacher’s evaluation results. Professional development is often a substantial part of schools’ operational expenditure. The city pairs weak and inexperienced teachers with high performing and experienced ones. Important platforms for teacher professional development and performance evaluation, teaching-research groups and lesson observations, are also practiced universally in schools. Teachers are expected to be researchers who would evaluate and modify their own pedagogy in relation to student outcomes. The city requires new teachers to complete at least 360 hours of professional development in their first five years of service, and an additional 540 hours to be considered for a senior rank. Overall, Shanghai is characterized by a coherent and comprehensive system of teacher professional development that incorporates multiple layers of in-service training, school-based teacher research groups, evaluation of teacher performance, and a structured career ladder that provides both motivation and a mechanism for teachers to progress in their careers, which is key to Shanghai’s demonstrated excellence in education

Trends in private sector development in World Bank education projects

Emerging trends in education show the private sector to be playing an increasingly important role in financing and providing educational services in many countries. Private sector development has not arisen primarily through public policy design, but has of course been affected by the design, and limitations of public policy. The author traces trends in private sector development in eleven of seventy World Bank education projects in 1995-97, asking two questions: What has been the rationale for Bank lending in education? And, in countries where there is both privately financed, and publicly financed, and provided education, how has the Bank encouraged the private sector to thrive? The eleven country samples reveal that the Bank's interest in private sector development is basically in capacity-oriented privatization, to absorb excess demand for education. This is crucial to the Bank's general strategy for education lending: promoting access with equity, focusing on efficiency in resource allocation, promoting quality, and supporting capacity building. Absorbing excess demand tends to involve poorer families, usually much poorer than those that take advantage of other forms of privatized education. The Bank emphasizes capacity-oriented privatization, especially of teacher training for primary, and secondary schools, as well as institutional capacity building for tertiary, and vocational education. The underlying principle is that strengthening the private sector's role in non-compulsory education over time, will release public resources for the compulsory (primary) level. The private sector is emerging as a force governments, donors, and other technical assistance agencies cannot ignore. Often the term private sector encompasses households'out-of-pocket expenses, rather than describing for-profit, or not-for-profit (religious or otherwise) sectors. And lumpy investments, supporting both private, and public education, are the norm.Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Decentralization,Teaching and Learning,Public Health Promotion,Curriculum&Instruction,Primary Education,Gender and Education,Economics of Education

The Coin of the Realm: Identifying the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Skill Requirements of Twenty-First Century Occupations

This report presents the findings from a novel survey instrument developed for a clientbased project completed in Spring 2016 with the nonprofit educational organization ACT, Inc. The pilot study collects and analyzes survey data from 482 workers in the U.S. labor force, who were asked to identify the likelihood that their current job would require specific information and communication technology skills (ICTs) on day one, with no on-the-job training. Drawing from the literature in education, communications theory, sociology and economics, the study seeks to test the strength and direction of the relationship between ICT skills and respondents’ specific jobs. The motivation for this research is to understand the importance of these data and its potential role in the development of curricular frameworks that teach twenty-first century skills. Within the education policy arena, the theory of action for such frameworks is that they are typically designed to improve college- and career-readiness via compulsory schooling during the K-12 years and into one’s career. Using descriptive statistics, the findings from the pilot study indicate a mean composite score across all ICT sub-skills and Bureau of Labor Statistics/O*NET job zones as 2.88 out of 4. Using inferential measures of association, a statistically significant and positive correlation between the average ICT skill required in jobs and job zone category is found, with a particular emphasis on the higher ICT skills expected by employers of workers in certain “in-demand” jobs, typically found in job zones 3 and 4: accountants, computer scientists, educators, engineers and paralegals. Lower than average ICT skills are also found among workers in other in-demand jobs, such as nurses and members of the military. These findings, and the survey model developed, have the potential to inspire further research (by ACT and other organizations) into the role that technology and information literacy plays in equipping the U.S. workforce for twenty-first century job requirements. While the deployment of this pilot survey on Amazon Mechanical Turk suggests limited generalizability to full U.S. population, it also invites a perspective on implications for public policy and management. Two of these recommendations are to provide more effective and earlier training and curricular programming related to ICT skills for K-12 students, and to consider ways to refine and test the O*NET job zones for possible improvement to the alignment between the ICT skill requirements listed and real-world expectations by employers

From Dakar to Brasilia: Monitoring Unesco´s Education Goals

Active participation of Brazilian civil society, coupled with the 2007 education development plan, launched by the Brazilian government provides an interesting example of the influences of the Dakar Goals. The two domestic initiatives share the same name, spirit and direction proposed in Dakar 2000. We analyse here changes in the Brazilian policies and indicators related to the Dakar Education Goals since its creation, we note: (i) an increase in enrolment over the relevant period; (ii) access to primary education was nearly universal by 2000; (iii) over-aged youth and adult students fell considerably during the period, but access did not expand; (iv) illiteracy has been falling at a rate which, if sustained, will enable us to meet the goal; (v) gender discrimination did not take place in Brazil; (vi) most pupil proficiency indicators have progressively deteriorated from what was already a low standard. In summary, quantity indicators did improve over the period while most quality indicators worsened.