Although girls and boys perform similarly in the PISA science assessment at age 15, girls are less likely than boys to envision a career in science and engineering, even in countries where they outperform them.

Late next month (21 November, to be exact) we’ll be releasing the results PISA’s first-ever assessment of students’ ability to solve problems collaboratively. Why has PISA focused on this particular set of skills? Because in today’s increasingly interconnected world, people are often required to collaborate in order to achieve their objectives, both in the workplace and in their personal lives.

Solving unfamiliar problems on one’s own is important, but in today’s increasingly interconnected world, people are often required to collaborate in order to achieve their goals. Teamwork has numerous benefits, from a diverse range of opinions to synergies among team members, and assigning tasks to those who are best suited to them.

What's new in education and skills at the OECD?

New Delhi, India, 8-9 November 2017. This symposium looked at how to implement effective financial education policies in a changing financial landscape with a focus on financial education in the digital age.

Teaching is a demanding profession. Teachers are responsible for developing the skills and knowledge of their students, helping them overcome social and emotional hurdles and maintaining equitable, cohesive and productive classroom environments. On top of their teaching responsibilities, they are also expected to engage in continued professional development activities throughout their careers.

The Innovative Teaching for Effective Learning (ITEL) Teacher Knowledge Survey is the first international study to explore the nature, function and development of teachers’ pedagogical knowledge, i.e. what teachers know about teaching and learning.

The assessment examines students’ ability to work with two or more people to try to solve a problem. The report highlights how students’ gender, socio-economic status and immigrant background are related to their performance in the assessment and to their attitudes towards collaboration in general.

New well-being data released today expose deep divisions in our society along fault lines of age, wealth, gender and education. The OECD’s latest How’s Life? report shows that while some aspects of well-being have improved since 2005, too many people are unable to share the benefits of the modest recovery that is underway in many OECD countries.

Skills have become the currency of 21st century economies and, despite the significant increase the UK has seen in university graduation over the last decade, the earnings of workers with a Master’s degree remain over 80% higher than those of workers with just five good GCSEs or an equivalent vocational qualification.

Higher education is one of the most globally integrated systems of the modern world. There still are important barriers to the international recognition of degrees or the transfer of credits, but some of the basic features of higher education enjoy global convergence and collaboration.

Taken as a whole, the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC) present a mixed picture for Korea and Singapore. As their economies have grown, these two countries’ education systems have seen fast and impressive improvements; both now rank among PISA’s top performers.

To boost growth, productivity and earnings, the UK should encourage lifelong learning among adults and promote better skills utilisation, according to a new OECD report.

Girls are much better than boys at working together to solve problems, according to the first OECD PISA assessment of collaborative problem solving.

Successes and failures in the classroom will increasingly shape the fortunes of countries. And yet, more of the same education will only produce more of the same strengths and weaknesses.

This month’s PISA in Focus provides an overview of the assessment’s results and shows that collaborative problem-solving performance is positively related to performance in the core PISA subjects (science, reading and mathematics). The results also show, among other findings, that girls perform significantly better than boys in collaborative problem solving in every country and economy that participated in the assessment.

with Andreas Schleicher - Director for the Directorate of Education and Skills (November 21, 2017)

Do today’s students really know how to work well together? For the first time ever, the Programme for International Student Assessment 2015 (otherwise known as PISA) examined students’ ability to collaborate to solve problems and the necessary social skills involved in that process.

The Teaching and Learning International Survey (otherwise known as TALIS) is a survey conducted every five years that asks teachers and school leaders from around the world about the working conditions and the learning environment in their schools.

Not every student’s brain works and learns in the same way. Classrooms are increasingly becoming more aware of what is known as "neurodiversity" among their students, a term used to describe neurodevelopmental disorders such as ADHD and ASD.

It can be difficult to get your head around education finance. Who actually pays for it, where does the money come from, and how is it spent are all crucial questions to ask if you want to understand how the money flows in education.

Despite the obvious benefits derived from education, governments face difficult trade-offs when balancing the share of public and private contributions to education.

Education systems need to prepare students for their future, rather than for our past. In these times, digitalisation is connecting people, cities and continents to bring together a majority of the world’s population in ways that vastly increases our individual and collective potential.

Too many people from disadvantaged backgrounds are falling behind in education and future job market, according to a new OECD report. Educational Opportunity For All says that children, students and adults from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds receive too little support to succeed in school and in learning opportunities later in life.

Education plays a dual role when it comes to social inequality and social mobility. It is the main way for societies to foster equality of opportunity and support upward social mobility for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. But the evidence is overwhelming that education often reproduces social divides in societies, through the impact that parents’ economic, social and cultural status has on children’s learning outcomes.

In 2015, 193 countries committed to achieving the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations, a shared vision of humanity that provides the missing piece of the globalisation puzzle. The extent to which that vision becomes a reality will in no small way depend on what is happening in today’s classrooms. Indeed, it is educators who hold the key to ensuring that the SDGs become a real social contract with citizens.

France’s economy is growing and the labour market is gradually improving. However, the share of people out of work for more than 12 months remains high and many young people are on temporary contracts, with weak long-term job prospects and little opportunity for training.

Recent reforms of Italy’s education system (“Buona Scuola”), labour market (“Jobs Act”) and industrial policy (“Industria 4.0”) have clear synergies and could reduce worrying imbalances between the supply and demand of skills on the Italian labour market, according to the new OECD report Getting Skills Right: Italy.

"Everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side, without ever bothering to examine the evidence”, George Orwell wrote in 1943. And in an era of ‘fake news’ and post-truth, it resembles our world today.

Standardised testing has received a bad rap in recent years. Parents and educators argue that too much testing can make students anxious without improving their learning.

Standardised tests help measure student’s progress at school and can inform education policy about existing shortfalls. However, too much testing could lead to much pressure on students and teachers to learn and teach for a test, something that would take the joy out of the learning process.

A university degree has always been considered as key to a good job and higher wages. But as the share of tertiary-educated adults across OECD countries has almost doubled over the last two decades, can the labour market absorb this growing supply of skills?

Across OECD countries, more and more individuals have attained tertiary education and the share of those with less education has declined. Although there are more tertiary-educated individuals than ever before, they still achieve good labour market outcomes.

Looking – literally – at how teachers around the world teach can be a game changer to improve education. The evidence is clear that teachers are what makes the greatest difference to learning, outside students’ own backgrounds. It is widely recognised that the quality of an education system is only as good as the quality of its teachers. Yet we know relatively little about what makes a good and effective teacher.

While teachers can make a great difference to student outcomes, we know little about how they teach and what makes “good” teaching. The TALIS Video Study is a new OECD project that aims at understanding what teaching practices are used, how they are interrelated, and which ones are most related to students’ cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes.

The world’s growing complexity and diversity present both opportunity and challenge. On the one hand, globalization can bring important new perspectives, innovation, and improved living standards. But on the other, it can also contribute to economic inequality, social division, and conflict.

This new publication sets forward the PISA framework for global competence developed by the OECD, which aligns closely with the definition developed by the Center for Global Education at Asia Society.

Over the last generation, it has become clear that something has gone awry in how the United States prepares its young people for life. In spite of millions of young people pursuing university education, fewer than one in three young Americans successfully attain a bachelor’s degree, while millions of good middle-skills jobs go begging.

Digitisation is expected to profoundly change the way we learn and work – at a faster pace than previous major drivers of transformation. Many children entering school today are likely to end up working in jobs that do not yet exist.

PISA 2015 data show that, on average across OECD countries, as many as three out of four students from the lowest quarter of socio-economic status reach, at best, only the baseline level of proficiency (Level 2) in reading, mathematics or science.

The ground realities of the nation's much neglected government-managed school system are beginning to impact the national consciousness, reports Summiya Yasmeen.

The Education Bill 2003 is well-intended, but its implication for contemporary Indian conditions must be examined first, says Sankrant Sanu.

Half a century after it started funding the massive expansion of higher education, the University Grants Commission is gearing itself up to engineer a quality revolution.

The UGC has given the green signal to a plethora of value-added, job-oriented diploma programmes in colleges and varsities. An Education World report.

The new government's higher priority to education is seeing experts and activists revisit the 40-year old Kothari Commission recommendations for a common school system. Summiya Yasmeen reports.

A Shanghai-based university's ranking of world universities has relegated the highly-rated Indian Institute of Science and the IITs to the bottom of its list, shattering the comfortable assumptions of Indian academics who pride themselves on their achievements. Summiya Yasmeen reports.

To mark its fifth anniversary, EducationWorld asked several educationists and industry leaders with proven commitment to improving the education system to write prescriptions for a renaissance of Indian education. Dilip Thakore threads the responses together.

While politicians label it 'revolutionary' legislation, experts feel that the draft bill on the fundamental right to education ignores important issues, such as education for children below six and above 14. It also dilutes the meaning of 'rights', leaving the door open for the government to not meet its obligations. Deepa A reports.

A draft curriculum for teacher training acknowledges several problems in preparing teachers properly for the classroom, but it's unclear if the proposed revisions would adequately tackle these. The typical classroom in India is nothing like the environment that teachers train in, and this, say experts, must change first. Deepa A reports.

For decades, there have been concerns that India's universities were being bogged down by the number of institutes they had to manage. Recently, the University Grants Commission accepted in principle that autonomy must be green-lighted. But debates on the freedom of institutions remain inconclusive, reports Deepa A.