Within the policy field of student assessment, the assessment of students for qualification and certification in upper secondary education has special importance since key decisions for the progression of students may be taken on the basis of assessment results. Students in most OECD countries...

OECD’s Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) has worked on Open Educational Resources (OER) in the past, which led to the publication Giving Knowledge for Free – the Emergence of Open Educational Resources (2007). This working paper thus builds on exploratory and...

How to hold autonomous schools and school governing boards accountable for their decisions and performance has become a particularly pressing question for central governments in many OECD countries. Increasing complexity in education systems has led to a greater degree of freedom in decision...

Creativity is widely accepted as being an important outcome of schooling. Yet there are many different views about what it is, how best it can be cultivated in young people and whether or how it should be assessed. And in many national curricula creativity is only implicitly acknowledged and...

This paper explores the participation of low- and middle-income countries in OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). It provides a detailed description of partner countries’ participation across PISA rounds and the challenges faced by low- and middle-income partner...

This study provides a literature review on school funding formulas across OECD countries. It looks at three salient questions from a comparative perspective: i) What kind of school formula funding schemes exist and how are they used, particularly for promoting the needs of socially disadvantaged...

While a number of single-country studies have been done to explore whether or not there is a “critical age” at which the arrival in a new country becomes a steep disadvantage to the immigrant student, this study aims to determine whether the steepness of the age-at-arrival/test score profile...

The Italian Ministry of Education launched in 2007 a National Plan for Digital Schools (Piano Nazionale Scuola Digitale) to mainstream Information Communication Technology (ICT) in Italian classrooms and use technology as a catalyser of innovation in Italian education, hopefully conducing to new...

Many international comparisons of education over the past 50 years have included some measure of students’ opportunity to learn (OTL) in their schooling. Results have typically confirmed the common sense notion that a student’s exposure in school to the assessed concepts, operationalized in...

The relationship between ageing and skills is becoming an important policy issue, not least in the context of population ageing. Data from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) will potentially add considerably to the understanding of the relationship...