Publications

The OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment’s (PISA) 2018 included an optional assessment that examines 15-year-old students’ understanding about money matters and financial literacy. Around 117,000 students took part in this assessm

21st-century skills are increasingly important, what is not fully appreciated is the extent to which these skills rely upon strong foundational literacy and numeracy skills. Foundational cognitive skills are defined as to understand, use and interpret written and mathematical information. It is difficult to critically evaluate, problem-solve or analyze data without such skills. For young adults graduating from high school and college, it is typically assumed that they have acquired these foundational skills.

Rebecca Vukovic, in her article, argues that although almost 90% of teachers in OECD's TALIS 2018 study reported that they liked their profession, only a few reported that they think they were valued by the society. In this article, the author goes on to disseminate findings from the TALIS 2018 study to highlight teachers' views on different aspects of their profession.

The author in the article assesses the impacts of the ongoing pandemic crisis by the COVID-19 virus. The article proposes mitigation strategies to adapt to the given situation to minimize the negative impacts on educational practices and learning, such as making use of technology to continue teaching and learning practices, empowering teachers and encouraging innovation, and maintaining the social fabric of schools in the society.

Jenny Anderson and Amanda Shendruk disseminate results of Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) for its 2018 cycle under various themes across countries. They emphasize that similar to the previous cycle of PISA, China and Singapore ranked top in math, science, and reading. The article also stated that Estonia performed significantly better than its performance in the prior cycle.

Authors Louis Volante and Francesca Borgonovi looks back into the long discussed topic of gender disparity in learning outcomes. They refer to the recent PISA studies and convey that things are changing, and the gap is closing up. However, the interesting problem is that, it is not the boys who are necessarily doing better, rather it is the performance of the girls that has declined.

In this article author Adam Carey explain how the gap of schooling quality between the wealthy and the poor is increasing over time with respect to teacher shortages. Research shows that students from disadvantaged schools  are more than five times more likely to have their learning disrupted due to teacher absenteeism.

Sabine Meinck and Agnes Stancel-Piątak explain in their blog the importance of early childhood education, and the factors that encourage early childhood learning. The blog post refers to their article 'Preparing the ground: The importance of early learning activities at home for fourth grade student achievement' in which they disseminate their findings basing on data from TIMSS and PIRLS studies.

This article is an excerpt from the book 'Limitless Mind' authored by Jo Boaler, which explains the importance of stimulating academic environments that boost learning and increase productivity.