Formative Assessment: the CERI context

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• Formative Assessment the CERI context
• Tom Schuller
• Paris, January 2005

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Directorate For Financial Fiscal and Enterprise
Affairs
Directorate for Employment Labour and Social
Affairs
Trade Directorate
Economics Department
Directorate for Education
COUNCIL
Directorate for Public Management and
Territorial Development
SECRETARIAT
Centre for Educational Research and
Innovation (CERI)
COMMITTEES
Statistics Directorate
Directorate for Food Agriculture and Fisheries
Environment Directorate
Directorate for Science Technology and Industry
Development Co-operation Directorate
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Education andTraining PolicyDivision
Indicators andAnalysisDivision
DirectorateforEducation
IMHE/PEB
Centre forEducationResearch andInnovation
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CERIs goals

• To enrich international knowledge and
  understanding of trends and issues in lifelong
  learning, ie across all sectors and modes
• To encourage better links between research,
  policy innovation and practice.

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We do this by

• Promoting research and policy debate through
  publications, electronic discussion and
  conferences.
• Carrying out studies of key educational issues,
  using a combination of our own staff and outside
  experts from around the world.
• Developing tools, indicators and frameworks for
  international analyses of education systems and
  practices.

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Our programme

• Lifelong learning provides the overarching
  context. Within that our key themes are

• Innovation and knowledge management.
• Human and social capital.
• A futures focus.
• Learning and teaching.

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OECD/CERI contextual factors

• Growing preoccupation with outcomes, as well as
  inputs and participation rates outcomes are more
  than qualifications achieved.
• The returns to education cannot be understood in
  terms of individual performance alone
• CERI interest in evidence and in causal
  mechanisms.
• Data availability and appropriate measurement
  the need for mixed methodologies

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EDU/CERI related projects

• PISA
• Teachers
• Schooling for Tomorrow/University Futures what
  works in futures thinking
• Learning Science the brain project effective
  learning at different points in the lifecourse
• Evidence-based Policy Research matching methods
  to issues

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Key issues

• Asking the right questions relevant, significant
  and (partly) answerable
• Maintaining trust valuing experience, but
  combined with accountability
• Accumulating evidence including on evidence

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Conference goals

• Share, examine and extend the findings of the
  CERI study
• Critique/confirm the model and the evidence
• Scaling up how to implement FA on wider basis
• Link to next WW study, on adult basic skills

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• It is hardly possible to over-rate the value
  .of placing human beings in contact with persons
  dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of
  thought and action unlike those with which they
  are familiarSuch communication has always been,
  and is peculiarly in the present age, one of the
  primary sources of progress.
• JS Mill, Principles of Political Economy