The Peruvian in-service programme is a nationwide intervention intended to improve teachers’ ability to perform, and its final objective is to increase student achievement. The programme, delivered since 2008, includes a three-year systematic process of monthly meetings with a supervisor (coach), which usually take the form of personal coaching, workshops and conferences. During those meetings, the coach discusses directly how to improve with the selected teachers and suggests pedagogical proces...
The Millennium Development Goals were announced to the world in the year 2000. They marked a significant milestone in instituting a goal-based approach towards development. In terms of policies, they have arguably been the most successful in driving the world’s agenda towards global development. But when it comes to education, the extent to which they made a difference after 15 years remains inconclusive. In 2015 the Sustainable Development Goals replaced the Millennium Development Goals. Goal n...
I’m involved in an exciting pilot project on ‘Open Educational Badging’ – and I must admit that it’s scary because I barely understand ICT, especially coding. Still, the participants in the ‘Evidence-Based Research Methods’ (EPRM) programme that I direct will be awarded online badges that can be linked to their social network profiles, and show that they successfully completed the courses. You may wonder how an ICT-averse person like me ends up in an ICT-innovative educational pilot programme. I...
Policies that cut school expenditures under the premise of “doing more with less” can also contribute to a decrease in high school graduation rates that could easily cancel out those savings. Shutterstock A joint post by Profs. Louis Volante, Jo Ritzen et al. Recently, the Ontario government proposed educational reforms that collectively amount to savings of almost $1 billion, according to an analysis by the charity People for Education. As a result of reforms, students will receive less attenti...
Since 2000 when the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) launched a global academic benchmark for measuring student outcomes by testing 15-year-olds, many global education systems have been impacted by what sometimes looks and feels like a race to rank high. When the OECD launched the Programme for International Student Assessment — PISA — the idea was to enable countries to make cross-national comparisons of student achievement using a common/standard metric to increase...
A joint post by Prof. Louis Volante and Dr. John Jerrim Educators around the world, particularly those in secondary schools, often default to a compelling story when they are trying to motivate their students: Work hard, achieve well and you will secure a successful future with attractive job prospects. This is currently the conventional wisdom across much of the Western world, with strong links drawn between education, meritocracy and upward social mobility. But what does the research suggest a...
Canada is consistently one of the top 10 destination countries for international migrants. More than 7.5 million foreign-born Canadians entered the country through the immigration process, according to 2016 Census data — representing more than one in five Canadians and more than one third of school-aged students....
A guest post by Master’s student Zoë Ogahara. Videos produced by Zachary Strain. Classrooms in the EU are becoming more diverse, creating a wealth of learning opportunities but also presenting specific challenges. To put this in perspective, there are 5.4 million child migrants in Europe and children constitute over half the refugee population, according to UNICEF. While teacher training in special needs education (e.g. dyslexia) is often extensive, teachers are rarely given the specific k...
Why and how do some female child carers in Lesotho manage to stay in school despite being responsible for running a household? This was the question that researcher Brenda Yamba, originally from Zambia, wanted to answer. She defended her PhD at Maastricht University last June. “Brenda was what you might call a model student”, her supervisor Melissa Siegel says immediately. “In addition to being disciplined and eager to learn, she also dealt extremely well with feedback. She was hugely motivated ...
The ‘Programme for International Student Assessment’ (PISA) is an international measure of student achievement carried out every three years, weighing the performance of 15-year-olds in reading, mathematics, and science literacy in over 70 countries and economies worldwide. By examining PISA’s role in education governance and policy discourse, this new book, edited by Prof. Louis Volante, with a foreword by Prof. Jo Ritzen, provides an in-depth analysis of the educational change process – within...