The future of Greece's well-being will depend on improving educational performance to boost productivity and improve social outcomes. In the current economic context, with the need to get best value for spending, Greece must and can address inefficiencies in its education system. The challenges are significant. For example, Greece lags behind many…

This report for Australia forms part of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Review on Evaluation and Assessment Frameworks for Improving School Outcomes. The purpose of the Review is to explore how systems of evaluation and assessment can be used to improve the quality, equity and efficiency of school education. The…

At some point in their child's education, many parents have considered whether it would be worth the expense to enrol their child in a private school. For parents, private schools may offer a particular kind of instruction that is not available in public schools. If private schools also attract higher-performing students and better teachers than…

Across OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries, governments are having to work with shrinking public budgets while designing policies to make education more effective and responsive to growing demand. The 2011 edition of "Education at a Glance: OECD Indicators" enables countries to see themselves in the light of…

This sixth volume of the Programme for International Student Assessment 2009 (PISA 2009) results explores students' use of information technologies to learn. For PISA 2009, the framework for reading literacy has been developed to encompass reading electronic texts. This has led to an expansion of the description of text types to take account of…

"Education at a Glance 2011: Highlights" offers a reader-friendly introduction to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development's (OECD's) collection of internationally comparable data on education. As the name suggests, it is derived from "Education at a Glance 2011", the OECD's flagship compendium of education statistics. However, it…

The majority of OECD countries now implement one form or another of standards-based assessment and evaluation. The core logic of standards-based systems rests upon the alignment of three key elements: "standards" defining the knowledge and skills--or "competences"--students are expected to have attained at different stages of their education;…

The OECD Secretariat, at the invitation of the AHELO Group of National Experts, contracted the Tuning Association to undertake initial development work on learning outcomes to be used for valid and reliable assessments of students from diverse institutions and countries. The two disciplines selected for the AEHLO Feasibility Study are engineering…

This working paper aims to give an overview of the national policies that exist in the field of information and communication technology (ICT) and initial teacher education. Information on this topic was initially gathered via a survey, in the form of a country questionnaire, which was conducted as part of the analytical strand of the the…

"Designing for Education: Compendium of Exemplary Educational Facilities 2011" showcases over 60 recently built or refurbished educational facilities from 28 countries. Collectively, these projects demonstrate state-of-the-art design in this field and each one is lavishly illustrated with colour photos, plans and descriptions. [A free PDF is…

This report discusses the most relevant issues concerning student standardised testing in which there are no-stakes for students ("standardised testing") through a literature review and a review of the trends in standardised testing in OECD countries. Unlike standardised tests in which there are high-stakes for students, no-stakes implies that…

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development's (OECD's) Programme for International Student Assessment 2009 (PISA 2009) results show that in practically all OECD countries 15-year-old students who had attended some pre-primary school outperformed students who had not. In fact, the difference between students who had attended for more…

Since the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) 2000 and 2009 surveys both focused on reading, one can track in detail how student reading performance has changed over that period. Among the 26 OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries with comparable results in both assessments, Chile, Germany,…

With all the competition to get into the right universities to secure the best jobs, secondary school students are often encouraged to take after-school classes in subjects already taught in school to help them improve their performance--even if that means forsaking other fun and interesting ways of spending after-school hours, such as playing…

Classrooms and schools with more disciplinary problems are less conducive to learning, since teachers have to spend more time creating an orderly environment before instruction can begin. Interruptions in the classroom disrupt students' concentration on, and their engagement in, their lessons. Popular belief has it that every successive crop of…