School leadership for developing professional learning communities

Instructional leadership is the set of practices that principals use in relation to the improvement of teaching and learning. It is a strong predictor of how teachers collaborate and engage in a reflective dialogue about their practice. In most countries and economies, the majority of principals act as instructional leaders, though one-third rarely engage in any of this type of action. Distributed leadership is the ability of schools to incorporate different stakeholders in their decisionmaking processes. This type of leadership appears to advance the creation of a shared sense of purpose within schools. Nearly all schools involve their staff in decision-making processes, but they differ concerning the opportunities that are offered to students and their parents/guardians to be involved in school decisions. Principals who acquired instructional leadership competencies through training, or in a separate course, are more engaged in instructional leadership actions in their school than principals who have not participated in such training

PISA 2015 : resultados clave

Singapur supera en ciencias al resto de países/economías participantes. Japón, Estonia, Finlandia y Canadá son, por este orden, los cuatro países de la OCDE que mejores resultados obtienen. Cerca del 8% de los estudiantes de los países de la OCDE (y el 24% de los estudiantes de Singapur) obtienen resultados excelentes en ciencias, es decir, alcanzan los niveles 5 o 6. En estos niveles, los estudiantes poseen las habilidades y conocimientos científicos suficientes como para aplicar lo que saben de manera creativa y autónoma en muy diversas situaciones, aunque les resulten desconocidas. Cerca del 20% de los estudiantes de los países de la OCDE rinde por debajo del nivel 2, considerado el umbral básico de competencias científicos. En el nivel 2, los estudiantes pueden recurrir a contenidos y procedimientos científicos básicos que conocen para identificar una explicación apropiada, interpretar datos y reconocer la cuestión que trata un experimento simple. Todos los estudiantes deberían alcanzar el nivel 2 de competencias al concluir la educación obligatoria. En la mayoría de los países para los que se dispone de datos comparables, el rendimiento medio de los estudiantes en ciencias se ha mantenido prácticamente inalterado desde 2006. Sin embargo, los resultados medios en ciencias mejoraron entre 2006 y 2015 en Colombia, Israel, Macao (China), Portugal, Catar y Rumanía. Durante este periodo, en Macao (China), Portugal y Catar incrementó la proporción de estudiantes con resultados iguales o superiores al nivel 5, a la vez que se redujo la proporción de estudiantes con rendimientos inferiores al nivel de competencias básicas (nivel 2). • Aunque las diferencias por género en ciencias suelen ser pequeñas de media, en 33 países y economías hay un mayor porcentaje de alumnos que de alumnas con un nivel excelente. Finlandia es el único país en el que las chicas tienen más probabilidades de alcanzar un nivel excelente que los chicos. De media, en los países de la OCDE, el 25% de los chicos y el 24% de las chicas declaró querer dedicarse a una profesión relacionada con las ciencias. Pero chicos y chicas suelen pensar en trabajar en distintos ámbitos de la ciencia: con más frecuencia que los chicos, las chicas se ven como profesionales de la salud; y prácticamente en todos los países, estos aspiran a ser informáticos, científicos o ingenieros más a menudo que las chicas. Cerca del 20% de los estudiantes de los países de la OCDE no obtiene, de media, las competencias lectoras básicas. Esta proporción se ha mantenido estable desde 2009. De media, en los países de la OCDE, la diferencia en lectura a favor de las niñas disminuyó 12 puntos en la prueba PISA entre 2009 y 2015: el rendimiento de los chicos mejoró, particularmente entre aquellos con mejores resultados, mientras que el de las chicas empeoró, sobre todo entre aquellas con peores resultados. • Más de uno de cada cuatro estudiantes en Pekín-Shanghái-Jiangsu-Guangdong (China), Hong Kong (China), Singapur y China Taipéi logra un nivel excelente en matemáticas, lo que significa que pueden enfrentarse a tareas que les exijan formular situaciones complejas de manera matemática mediante representaciones simbólicas

What are the benefits from early childhood education?

Early childhood education and care programmes (ECEC) have become more accessible in recent years, with high enrolment rates in both early childhood educational development and preprimary education. The educational results of students at the age of 15 may be partially explained by attendance at pre-primary education, which sharply decreases the likelihood of low performance in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Pre-primary education can play a strong role in promoting equality at an early age, particularly by targeting disadvantaged groups such as first- and second-generation immigrants. Assuring and monitoring the quality of programmes is key to guaranteeing that early childhood education and care has a positive impact on both equity and performance in education

Equations and Inequalities : making mathematics accesible to all

While education systems have generally done well in providing equitable access to the quantity of mathematics education – in the sense that disadvantaged students spend about the same time in mathematics classes in school as their advantaged peers – the data show large differences in the quality of learning experiences between social groups. These inequalities result in a waste of talent. While disadvantaged students tend to learn simple facts and figures and are exposed to simple applied mathematics problems, their privileged counterparts experience mathematics instruction that help them think like a mathematician, develop deep conceptual understanding and advanced mathematical reasoning skills. These differences matter, because greater exposure to pure mathematics tasks and concepts has a strong relationship with higher performance in PISA, and the data suggest that exposing all students to challenging problems and conceptual knowledge in mathematics classes can have a large impact on performance. In addition, the relationship between the content covered during mathematics instruction at school and the socio-economic profile of students and schools is stronger in countries that track students early into different study programmes, that have larger percentages of students in selective schools, and that transfer less-able students to other schools. On the one hand, the findings from this report are disappointing, in the sense that they show that mathematics education often reinforces, rather than moderates, inequalities in education. On the other hand, they show that high-quality mathematics education, and thus education policy and practice, are an essential part of the solution to redressing social inequality. Policy makers can develop more ambitious and coherent mathematics standards that cover core mathematical ideas in depth, increase connections between topics and align instructional systems with these standards. They can also reduce tracking and stratification and/or moderate their effects. Teachers can help students acquire higher-order mathematics knowledge and skills by replacing routine tasks with challenging open problems, support positive attitudes towards equations and inequalities: making mathematics accessible to all mathematics, provide students with multiple opportunities to learn key concepts at different levels of difficulty, and offer tailored support to struggling students. Parents’ expectations and attitudes towards mathematics matter too. And we can all do much better in monitoring and analysing not just students’ learning outcomes, but students’ opportunity to learn

Fomento de las comunidades de aprendizaje entre el profesorado

Según el Estudio Internacional sobre la Enseñanza y el Aprendizaje (TALIS), los profesores de todos los países demandan, de forma abrumadora, más desarrollo profesional. En todos los países TALIS, las tasas de desarrollo profesional cooperativo y de prácticas docentes colaborativas son bajas. Los países podrían utilizar el desarrollo profesional para construir y mejorar con eficacia y eficiencia comunidades profesionales de aprendizaje en los centros educativos

School Improvement Through Strong Leadership

According to the OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS), principals, on average, report frequently engaging in a number of activities that are consistent with instructional leadership. However, this is not the case in every country and large proportions of them report that their training did not include any instructional leadership training or course. Although continuous professional development could help fill those gaps, many school leaders report a number of obstacles preventing them from taking part in such learning, including a lack of support and opportunities, and personal and professional obstacles

How does PISA assess science literacy?

Every three years, in December, it’s PISA time around the world. The education community in participating economies eagerly awaits the latest results from the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (coming out on 6 December this year) to see how their school systems compare with others across the globe. The most recent round of the assessment, PISA 2015, focused on 15-year-olds’ science literacy, defined as “the ability to engage with science-related issues, and with the ideas of science, as a reflective citizen”. To succeed on the PISA science test, students had to display their mastery of three skills: explaining phenomena scientifically (based on knowledge of scientific facts and ideas), evaluating and designing scientific enquiry, and interpreting data and evidence scientifically. As this definition makes clear, remembering that a free-falling object on Earth has an acceleration of 9.8m/s2, or what the difference between bacteria and viruses is, will not necessarily be rewarded with a high score in PISA (although it might be important to know those facts too). Rather, PISA emphasises that a science-literate person is one who uses that knowledge to navigate through today’s world; and that all of us sometimes need to “think like a scientist” – to weigh evidence and come to a conclusion, and to understand that scientific “truth” may change over time, as new discoveries are made – particularly when we engage with science-related issues. And science-related issues are ubiquitous. Every day, the public is bombarded with new messages based on science – from the advertising claims that a toothpaste kills “99% of bacteria” to the nutritional information on packaged food or the report about the latest Mars mission in the evening news. An understanding of science, and of science-based technology, is necessary not only for those whose careers depend on it directly, but also for any citizen who wishes to make informed decisions related to the many controversial issues under debate today – from more personal concerns, such as maintaining a healthy diet, to local dilemmas, such as how to manage waste in big cities, to more global and far-reaching considerations, such as the costs and benefits of genetically modified crops or how to prevent and mitigate the catastrophic consequences of global warming

Unlocking the Potential of Teacher Feedback

Across countries and economies participating in the OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS), a majority of teachers report receiving feedback on different aspects of their work in their schools. Teacher feedback has a developmental focus, with many teachers reporting that it leads to improvements in their teaching practices, and other aspects of their work. However, not all feedback is seen as meaningful: nearly half of the teachers across TALIS countries report that teacher appraisal and feedback systems in their school are largely undertaken simply to fulfil administrative requirements. Teachers who consider that they receive meaningful feedback on their work also tend to have more confidence in their own abilities and to have higher job satisfaction

Are disadvantaged students given equal opportunities to learn mathematics?

Some 65% of socio-economically advantaged students reported that they know well or have often heard of the concept of quadratic function, on average across OECD countries; but only 43% of disadvantaged students so reported. On average across OECD countries, the 20% of students who are most exposed to pure mathematics tasks (equations) score, on the PISA mathematics test, the equivalent of almost two school years ahead of the 20% of students who are least exposed. Exposure to simple applied mathematics tasks is much less strongly associated with better performance. About 19% of the performance difference between socio-economically advantaged and disadvantaged students can be attributed to differences in familiarity with mathematics. In Austria and Korea, more than  30% of the performance gap between these two groups of students is related to differences in familiarity with mathematics. In other words, there are clear indications that disadvantaged students systematically receive mathematics instruction of lower quality than advantaged students

Supporting new teachers

In many countries, less experienced teachers (those with less than five years’ teaching experience) are more likely to work in challenging schools and less likely to report confidence in their teaching abilities than more experienced teachers. Most countries have activities in place aimed at preparing teachers for work, such as induction and mentoring programmes. Approximately 44% of teachers work in schools where principals report that all new teachers have access to formal induction programmes; 76% work in schools with access to informal induction; and 22% work in schools that only have programmes for teachers new to teaching. Fewer teachers report participation in induction and mentoring programmes than principals report the existence of such programmes