Text 1. O.E.C.D. Study Maps Shifting Ideals of Excellence

By Alice Pfeiffer

In a world that is being profoundly transformed by information technology that is evolving far faster than educational methods and curriculums, how well is tomorrow’s work force being trained for the challenges and opportunities ahead? A new report on shifting notions of excellence in education in more than 60 countries sheds some light on an increasingly skill-focused academic and professional environment and reveals what could be termed a more practical approach to intelligence.

“Top of the Class,” published Wednesday by the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development, is based on a study of education that the intergovernmental research and policy advisory agency, based in Paris, runs triennially on samples of 15-year-old students worldwide. The survey, the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, includes comprehensive tests in math, science and reading. Designed to provide policy makers with global benchmarks for assessing knowledge and skills acquisition, it also asks students to answer questions about themselves and their learning environment.

Based on data collected in the 2006 survey – this year’s update is just starting to be analyzed – it provides a special focus on science studies. It also offers a detailed discussion of the characteristics of excellence in school today, and, more important, how 15-year-olds can achieve optimal performance.

Academic excellence is evolving, the report says, and so are the opportunities for top performers: “The rapidly growing demand for highly skilled workers has led to a global competition for talent.”

Education has to take account of this mutating work environment, even at age 15, says Andreas Schleicher, head of the O.E.C.D.’s indicators and analysis division, who helped draft the PISA test. “The routine cognitive skills, that can be digitized, automated or outsourced, are no longer sufficient to be successful in the global economy.”

This necessarily affects perceptions of excellence at school level. PISA’s testing focuses on the functionality and efficacy of knowledge, measuring student performance primarily in terms of problem-solving capacity. Top performers must do more than reproduce subject matter content, says Mr. Schleicher. Indeed, PISA’s definition of top performance insists on the functional ability to extract knowledge and apply it to personal, social or global situations.

In the past, top school performance used to be seen in vague terms and theoretical notions, but excellence today must also mean excellent outcomes – especially in science, where applicability is everything, the report says. For modern education systems, in short, the end justifies the means.

Looked at in this light, data in the report show the U.S. education system rather favorably compared with many others: 91.2 percent of top U.S. students, for instance, say their education in science is applicable to everyday life, compared with only 79.3 percent in Japan; and at the other end of the scale, 74 percent of even the lowest U.S. performers still find their science knowledge relevant, compared with fewer than 50 percent in Sweden and Iceland.

PISA findings such as this are at the origin of much policy work. “PISA is a diagnosis, for example, pointing out the importance of skills and learning outside school,” said Patrick Werquin, a senior analyst at the O.E.C.D. and director of Research for Informal and Non-Formal Learning, an O.E.C.D.-based program that involves 23 countries in 5 continents and aims to quantify and validate non-academic skills to enable them to be counted as credits toward career-advancing qualifications.

“Educational curricula are extremely formal and rigid – but a lot of learning occurs outside school hours,” said Mr. Werquin, whose current work is focused on recovering the lost economic potential of students who drop out of high school without a diploma. By assessing a broad range of knowledge, both formal and informal, the program aims to establish pathways back into education or toward a job: “The aim is not having to start from scratch.”

Applying this approach, Britain, for example, has established a “Vocational Qualification Reform Program” that validates training credits awarded to employees for in-house company training. Under the program, piloted last year and now being rolled out more widely, pioneer companies including National Rail, McDonald’s and the low-fare regional airline Flybe are awarding in-house training credits that count toward nationally recognized and transferable qualifications, raising their employees’ value in the job market.

While critics say this amounts to little more than prettying up a dumbed-down work force, the British prime minister, Gordon Brown, emphatically disagrees. “It is going to be a tough course,” he told a television interviewer recently, referring to a McDonald’s program for training its restaurant managers, “but once you have got a qualification in management you can probably go anywhere.”

Another, very different, application of the approach is the Canadian Learning Index, a yearly measure that aims to quantify and encourage “group excellence” in learning-related activities.

Rather than measuring individual achievements, the index takes a top-down approach, says Claude Cappon, president of the Canadian Council for Learning and project leader. It assesses entire communities in terms of the way they encourage members to combine their skills in socially useful knowledge projects.

The index last year recognized Blackfalds, Alberta, a community of about 5,000 people, as one of the 10 most improved small towns in Canada, rewarding the townsfolk for the way they got together to renovate and upgrade their public library.

“Performance is not always individual,” Mr. Cappon said. “There is also social, group intelligence. The elite might be good in individual terms, but it doesn’t mean we’re solving any problems” [5, p. 11].