How to prepare students for the complexity of a global society

by Anthony Jackson, Director, Center for Global Education at Asia Society
Andreas Schleicher, Director, Directorate for Education and Skills

In all countries, rapidly changing global economic, digital, cultural, and environmental forces are shaping young people’s lives and their futures. From
Boston to Bangkok to Buenos Aires, we live today in a VUCA world: volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous.

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.

How well education systems prepare all of their students to thrive amid today’s rapidly changing world will determine the future prosperity and security of their nations – and of the world as a whole. Global competence education is what will empower students to do just that. Globally competent students can draw on and combine the disciplinary knowledge and modes of thinking acquired in schools to ask questions, analyse data and arguments, explain phenomena, and develop a position concerning a local, global or cultural issue. They can retain their cultural identity but are simultaneously aware of the cultural values and beliefs of people around them, they examine the origins and implications of others’ and their own assumptions. And they can create opportunities to take informed, reflective action and have their voices heard.

On top of the complexity of our increasingly interconnected world, and the call of employers for better intercultural skills, we’ve watched in recent years as waves of nationalism, racism, and anti-globalism have swept across countries around the world. It makes global competence education that much more critical. To put it simply, the number-one solution to combating nationalist fervor is increasing global understanding.

Both the United Nations and OECD have prioritized global citizenship and global competence education in recent years, with good reason. Globally competent individuals are aware, curious, and interested in learning about the world and how it works, beyond their immediate environment. They recognize the perspectives and worldviews of others and are able to interact and communicate with people across cultures and regions in appropriate ways. And most critically, globally competent individuals don’t just understand the world (which is no small thing in and of itself)—they are an active part of it. They can and do take action to solve problems big and small to improve our collective well-being.

At the end of the day, it is globally competent individuals who will be able to solve the world’s seemingly intractable problems. And it’s up to our world’s educators to prepare those individuals for their global futures.

Schools can make an important difference. They are the first place where children encounter the diversity of society. They can provide students with opportunities to learn about global developments that affect the world and their own lives. They can teach students to develop a fact-based and critical worldview and equip students with an appreciation of other cultures and an awareness of their own cultural identities. They can engage students in experiences that facilitate international and intercultural relations. And they can promote the value of diversity, which in turn encourages sensitivity, respect and appreciation.

But how to do that? In a new publication by the Center for Global Education at Asia Society and OECD, Teaching for global competence in a rapidly changing world, we set forward the PISA framework for global competence developed by OECD, which aligns closely with the definition developed by the Center for Global Education. Based on Asia Society’s extensive experience supporting educators in integrating global competence into their teaching, the publication also provides practical guidance and examples of how educators can embed global competence into their existing curriculum, instruction, and assessment.

As the publication demonstrates through its myriad examples, teachers from around the world have already recognized the importance of teaching for global competence. In one example from a political science teacher in India, students visited a nearby refugee camp to learn about the complexity of the global refugee crisis; in another, a social studies teacher in Mexico guided her students to make recommendations for reducing corruption that they then presented to local officials.

But it also shows that for all students to develop global competence – regardless of their wealth, ethnicity, gender, or background – we need to create access to high-quality professional learning for every teacher in the world. Teachers prepared to develop students’ global competence is a requirement for a sustainable, livable future.

Professional learning for teachers is key, and that requires leveraging digital technology to rapidly build capacity at scale. The challenge now is providing access to these types of professional development resources for all teachers, to transform their teaching methods, their classrooms, their schools – and, eventually, each and every one of their students.

Links
Teaching for global competence in a rapidly changing world
Preparing our youth for an inclusive and sustainable world - The OECD PISA global competence framework
PISA 2018 Global Competence

Photo credit: Asia Society 

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Are school systems ready to develop students’ social skills?

by Andreas Schleicher
Director, Directorate for Education and Skills

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. Today’s students are growing up into a world hyperconnected by digitalisation; tomorrow, they’ll be working in a labour market that is already being hollowed-out by automation. For those with the right knowledge and skills, these changes are liberating and exciting. But for those who are insufficiently prepared, they can mean a future of vulnerable and insecure work, and a life lived on the margins.

In today’s schools, students typically learn individually, and at the end of the school year, we certify their individual achievements. But the more interdependent the world becomes, the more it needs great collaborators and orchestrators. Innovation is now rarely the product of individuals working in isolation; instead, it is an outcome of how we mobilise, share and integrate knowledge. These days, schools also need to become better at preparing students to live and work in a world in which most people will need to collaborate with people from different cultures, and appreciate a range of ideas and perspectives; a world in which people need to trust and collaborate with others despite those differences, often bridging space and time through technology; and a world in which individual lives will be affected by issues that transcend national boundaries.

PISA has a long history of assessing students’ problem-solving skills. A first assessment of cross-curricular problem-solving skills was undertaken in 2003; in 2012, PISA assessed creative problem-solving skills. The evolution of digital assessment technologies has now allowed PISA to carry out the world’s first international assessment of collaborative problem-solving skills, defined as the capacity of students to solve problems by pooling their knowledge, skills and efforts with others.

As one would expect, students who have stronger science, reading or mathematics skills also tend to be better at collaborative problem solving, because managing and interpreting information and complex reasoning are always required to solve problems. The same holds across countries: top-performing countries in PISA, like Japan, Korea and Singapore in Asia, Estonia and Finland in Europe, and Canada in North America, also come out on top in the PISA assessment of collaborative problem solving.

But individual cognitive skills explain less than two-thirds of the variation in student performance on the PISA collaborative problem-solving scale, and a roughly similar share of the performance differences among countries on this measure is explained by the relative standing of countries on the 2012 PISA assessment of individual, creative problem-solving skills. There are countries where students do much better in collaborative problem solving than what one would predict from their performance in the PISA science, reading and mathematics assessments. For example, Japanese students do very well in those subjects, but they do even better in collaborative problem solving. By contrast, students in the four Chinese provinces that took part in PISA did well in mathematics and science, but came out just average in collaborative problem solving. In a nutshell, while the absence of science, mathematics and reading skills does not imply the presence of social and emotional skills, social skills are not an automatic by-product of the development of academic skills either.

All countries need to make headway in reducing gender disparities. When PISA assessed individual problem-solving skills in 2012, boys scored higher in most countries. By contrast, in the 2015 assessment of collaborative problem solving, girls outperformed boys in every country, both before and after considering their performance in science, reading and mathematics. The relative size of the gender gap in collaborative problem-solving performance is even larger than it is in reading.

These results are mirrored in students’ attitudes towards collaboration. Girls reported more positive attitudes towards relationships, meaning that they tend to be more interested in others’ opinions and want others to succeed. Boys, on the other hand, are more likely to see the instrumental benefits of teamwork and how collaboration can help them work more effectively and efficiently. As positive attitudes towards collaboration are linked with the collaboration-related component of performance in the PISA assessment, this opens up an avenue for intervention for schools.

There also seem to be factors in the classroom environment that relate to those attitudes. PISA asked students how often they engage in communication-intensive activities, such as explaining their ideas in science class; spending time in the laboratory doing practical experiments; arguing about science questions; and taking part in class debates about investigations. The results show a clear relationship between these activities and positive attitudes towards collaboration. On average, the valuing of relationships and teamwork is more prevalent among students who reported that they participate in these activities more often. For example, even after considering gender, and students’ and schools’ socio-economic profile, in 46 of the 56 education systems that participated in the assessment, students who reported that they explain their ideas in most or all science lessons were more likely to agree that they are “a good listener”; and in 37 of these 56 systems these students also agreed that they “enjoy considering different perspectives”. So there is much that teachers can do to facilitate a climate that is conducive to collaboration.

Many schools can also do better in fostering a learning climate where students develop a sense of belonging, and where they are free of fear. Students who reported more positive student-student interactions score higher in collaborative problem solving, even after considering the socio-economic profile of students and schools. Students who don’t feel threatened by other students also score higher in collaborative problem solving. In contrast, students who reported that their teachers say something insulting to them in front of others at least a few times per year score 23 points lower in collaborative problem solving than students who reported that this didn’t happen to them during the previous year.

It is interesting that disadvantaged students see the value of teamwork often more clearly than their advantaged peers. They tend to report more often that teamwork improves their own efficiency, that they prefer working as part of a team to working alone, and that they think teams make better decisions than individuals. Schools that succeed in building on those attitudes by designing collaborative learning environments might be able to engage disadvantaged students in new ways.

The inter-relationships between social background, attitudes towards collaboration and performance in collaborative problem solving are even more interesting. The data show that exposure to diversity in the classroom tends to be associated with better collaboration skills.

Finally, education does not end at the school gate when it comes to helping students develop their social skills. It is striking that only a quarter of the performance variation in collaborative problem-solving skills lies between schools, much less than is the case in the academic disciplines. For a start, parents need to play their part. For example, students score much higher in the collaborative problem-solving assessment when they reported that they had talked to their parents outside of school on the day prior to the PISA test, and also when their parents agreed that they are interested in their child’s school activities or encourage them to be confident.

PISA also asked students what kinds of activities they pursue both before and after school. Some of these activities – using the Internet/chat/social networks; playing video games; meeting friends or talking to friends on the phone; and working in the household or taking care of family members – might have a social, or perhaps antisocial, component to them. The results show that students who play video games score much lower, on average, than students who do not play video games, and that gap remains significant even after considering social and economic factors as well as performance in science, reading and mathematics. At the same time, accessing the Internet, chatting or social networking tends to be associated with better collaborative problem-solving performance, on average across OECD countries, all other things being equal.

In sum, in a world that places a growing premium on social skills, a lot more needs to be done to foster those skills far more systematically across the school curriculum. Strong academic skills will not automatically also lead to strong social skills. Part of the answer might lie in giving students more ownership over the time, place, path, pace and interactions of their learning. Another part of the answer can lie in fostering more positive relationships at school and designing learning environments that benefit students’ collaborative problem-solving skills and their attitudes towards collaboration. Schools can identify those students who are socially isolated, organise social activities to foster constructive relationships and school attachment, provide teacher training on classroom management, and adopt a whole-of-school approach to prevent and address bullying. But part of the answer lies with parents and society at large. It takes collaboration across a community to develop better skills for better lives.

Links
PISA 2015 Results (Volume V), Collaborative Problem Solving
PISA in Focus No. 77: How does PISA measure students’ ability to collaborate?
PISA in Focus No. 78: Collaborative problem solving 
Programme for International Student Assessment's (PISA)

Register for a public webinar on Tuesday, 21 November, 4:00 pm (Paris time) with Andreas Schleicher, Director of the OECD Education and Skills Directorate, and Jeffrey Mo, an analyst in the PISA programme.

Follow the conversation on twitter: #OECDPISA

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How PISA measures students’ ability to collaborate

by Andreas Schleicher

Director, Directorate for Education and Skills

PISA 2015 Results (Volume V) Collaborative Problem Solving – Sample Question from EduSkills OECD

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. Working with others is not as easy as it sounds. One person might end up reproducing another’s work; poor communication and personal tensions between people might prevent a team from reaching its goal. So it’s worth finding out whether students today know what it takes to work (and play) well with others.

This month’s PISA in Focus describes what it means, according to PISA, to be competent in collaborative problem solving. Along with the skills needed to solve problems individually, a good team member also has to develop and maintain a shared understanding of the problem with his or her teammates, take the actions needed to solve the problem, and establish and maintain team organisation. These skills can help determine how students learn, teachers teach and how we judge the performance of schools.

PISA in Focus also explains how PISA is able to measure students’ collaboration skills – not, as you might expect, by observing students as they work with other students, but by following their interactions with team members who are actually computer simulations of humans (known as computer agents). Today’s technology allows us to assess students’ 21st century skills. Not only can the behaviour of these computer agents be controlled, but they can also be programmed so that some are more co-operative than others, and some may be more focused on solving the problem than others. Sound familiar? Yes: they’re programmed to be just like you and me.

Several “screen shots” from a part of the assessment that was released to the public are also presented so you can get a better idea of the kinds of tasks PISA students were asked to perform, and how the students’ responses express the skills they need to collaborate with others. In short, this month’s PISA in Focus gives you both a behind-the-scenes look at the thinking that went into the design of the assessment, and a front-row seat for when the results of the assessment are released next month.

Links 

PISA in Focus No. 77: How does PISA measure students’ ability to collaborate?

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)

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Does the world need people who understand problems, or who can solve them?

by Dirk Van Damme
Head of the Innovation and Measuring Progress Division, Directorate for Education and Skills 

The label “21st -century skills” is being increasingly used, and sometimes misused, to indicate that the rapidly changing economic, social and cultural environment of the current century demands a revision of what we think are crucial subjects for the next generations to learn. Examples include creativity, innovation, critical thinking, curiosity, collaboration, cross-cultural understanding or global competence. Some people wonder whether these skills are truly new, or whether education has always been about fostering these capabilities. But stakeholders – not least employers and the business sector – continue to complain that they don’t find candidates leaving the education systems who have the skills they think matter for the jobs they have to offer. And they claim that this is the case because current education systems do not sufficiently prioritise the development of such skills.

Many countries have recently embarked on a fundamental revision of their national curricula or curricula frameworks that offer guidance to schools and teachers. As is evident from the OECD project, The Future of Education and Skills: Education 2030, the need to rethink the skills toolkit in light of what tomorrow’s economies and societies will need is what keeps education policy makers and practitioners awake at night.

In these debates, the skill referred to as “problem solving” takes a prominent place. It is probably one of the most frequently referenced 21st-century skills. When the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) started to explore the possibility to assess domains other than reading, mathematics and science, it almost naturally moved to the area of problem solving. The assessment included a problem-solving test in 2012, followed by one on collaborative problem solving in 2015. One of the remarkable results in 2012 was that the results of the assessments of reading, mathematics and science were not very well aligned with the results of the assessment of problem-solving, despite the fact that the PISA assessment frameworks themselves – in contrast to that for TIMMS, for example – already focus on solving real-world problems, rather than applying textbook knowledge. Problem solving thus seems to be a distinct competence.

A recently published OECD publication, The Nature of Problem Solving: Using Research to Inspire 21st Century Learning, explores the concept of problem solving in great depth. The book does not offer an extensive assessment framework as such; rather, it discusses the conceptual and empirical research that various members of the Problem-Solving Expert Group for PISA 2012 used to build the assessment. The title of the volume explicitly refers to the publication, The Nature of Learning: Using Research to Inspire Practice. The book also fits into work on ongoing exploration of 21st-century skills.

While the book does not fully define the competency of problem solving, some common characteristics emerge. Problem-solving clearly builds on strong cognitive capabilities, but mobilises them in different ways. In solving problems that are usually complex, humans have to apply knowledge – often incomplete knowledge – in contexts where the conditions are often uncertain in order to offer a practical solution to a real-world challenge. Problem-solving is often referred to as a cross-curricular competence in the sense that solving problems in the real world obliges people to draw on knowledge from different fields and disciplines. Because real-world problems in volatile contexts are different from one another, problem-solving skills are unlike routine skills and procedural methods.

In the current debate on 21st-century skills, sometimes naïve views on innovating curriculum frameworks are being contested by policy makers and activists who defend a purely knowledge-oriented view of education and oppose recent shifts towards competency-based approaches in education. But in the case of problem solving, the knowledge-versus-skills dualism is not very helpful. The book clearly demonstrates that excellent problem-solving skills very much depend on deep levels of knowledge and outstanding analytical capabilities. But while cognitive and analytical capabilities help in interpreting and understanding problems, effective problem solving requires an additional element of decision making, implementation and communication. The combination of these capabilities is what makes problem-solving skills unique.

Research and reflection on problem solving and the deep analysis of the PISA results on both students’ individual and collaborative problem-solving skills are indispensable for innovating teaching and learning, and for making education more relevant and future oriented. The VUCA world – a world characterised by volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity – will demand only more problem-solving skills. It is not difficult to predict that tomorrow’s world will need more problem solvers.

Links
The Nature of Problem Solving: Using Research to Inspire 21st Century Learning
The Nature of Learning: Using Research to Inspire Practice
Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI)
The Future of Education and Skills: Education 2030
Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)

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Photo source: The Nature of Problem Solving: Using Research to Inspire 21st Century Learning, OECD

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