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...

A long-held ambition for many educators and assessment experts has been to integrate summative and formative assessments so that data from external assessments used for system monitoring may also be used to shape teaching and learning in classrooms. In turn, classroom-based assessments may...

The seminar on “Creating 21^st Century Learning Environments” was organised by the United Kingdom’s Department for Education and Skills (DfES) and the OECD Programme on Educational Building (PEB). Two presentations from the United Kingdom are described here.

“On the day we heard that there was agreement to establish an upper secondary school in the region, every house in Snaefellsnes flew the Icelandic flag,” explained one parent in the first workshop to develop the Snaefellsnes Upper Secondary School. The new school in this rural Icelandic...

Innovative teaching methods and organisational change make new demands on our future learning environments. The Brink and the Laak Clusters are two related examples of a new type of building for a community in the Netherlands. The Firebird School (<i>Vuurvogel</i>), a primary school for students from...

Do some forms of student (and school) assessment hinder the introduction of innovative educational practices and the development of innovation skills in education systems? This report focuses on the impact of high-stake summative assessment on innovation and argues that it is possible to...

Lors du premier atelier de préparation du développement du lycée de Snaefellsnes, un parent a expliqué que « Le jour où nous avons appris qu’il existait un accord pour établir une école secondaire supérieure dans la région, toutes les habitations de Snaefellsnes ont vu fleurir les...

Les nouvelles méthodes d’enseignement et les changements d’organisation vont à l’avenir soumettre nos environnements pédagogiques à de nouvelles exigences. Les deux complexes de Brink et de Laak sont deux exemples apparentés d’un nouveau type de construction à usage collectif aux...

C’est sous l’égide du ministère de l’Éducation et des Compétences du Royaume-Uni (DfES) et du Programme de l’OCDE pour la construction et l’équipement de l’éducation (PEB) que s’est tenu le séminaire intitulé « Concevoir les environnements d’apprentissage du XXI^e siècle...