Education Portal for Students in India

Education is the process of facilitating learning or the acquisition of knowledge, skills, values, beliefs and habits. Quality education specifically entails issues such as appropriate skills development, gender parity, provision of relevant school infrastructure, equipment, educational materials and resources, scholarships or teaching force.
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What is the meaning of education quality?

Balanced Approach – Quality education aims at developing a balanced set of capabilities of children they require to become economically productive, develop sustainable livelihoods, contribute to peaceful and democratic societies and enhance individual well-being. View complete answer

What is the main component of education?

The components are: 1. The Teacher 2. The Learning Material 3. The Learning Situation.
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What is the meaning of components of education?

Education Component means the curriculum focused on reducing impaired driving recidivism approved by the Department.
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What is quality education PDF?

A quality education is one that focuses on the whole child-the social, emotional, mental, physical, and cognitive development of each student regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, or geographic location. It prepares the child for life, not just for testing.

• It is believed that education leads to empowerment: a process of strengthening individuals, organisations and communities so they get more control over their own situations and environments.
• Quality education is a crucial factor in combating poverty and inequality in society.
• Teachers are at the heart of quality education.

Schools should have a sufficient number of trained teachers, receiving good quality pre-service and in-service training with built-in components on gender sensitivity, non-discrimination, and human rights. All teachers should be paid domestically competitive salaries.
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What is the main goal of quality education?

ENSURE INCLUSIVE AND EQUITABLE QUALITY EDUCATION AND PROMOTE LIFELONG LEARNING OPPORTUNITIES FOR ALL. Education liberates the intellect, unlocks the imagination and is fundamental for self-respect.
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What are the three components of the education process?

INTRODUCTION: Over recent years the study of the curriculum has assumed importance in all fields of education. The school curriculum of a country reflects the traditions, philosophy, values and principles of the country and people. Curriculum planning and development has itself become a specialized area of education.

1. A well planned and administered curriculum contributes to the development of the country and its people.
2. The term ‘curriculum’ is derived from the latin word ” curre ” which means ‘run’.
3. Thus curriculum means running race or course or ‘runaway’ for reaching a certain goal or destination as in a course of study1.

Pedagogically curriculum means the course of the studies to be pursued by the students or the content of education to be imparted through the organization of its entire work5. DEFINTION: In the words of Cunningham, “curriculum is in the hands of the artist (teacher) to mould his material (pupils) according to his ideals (aims and objectives) in his studio (school).

• The secondary Education Commission Report (1952-53) states that the “curriculum includes all the totality of experiences that a pupil receives through the manifold activities that go on in the school, in the class room, library, laboratory, workshop, playground and in the numerous informal contacts between teachers and students” 1,5,
• Peynes ‘ definition of curriculum is that “curriculum consists of all the situations that the school may select and consciously organize for the purpose of developing the personality of its pupils and for making behaviour changes in them” 1,
• CONCEPTS OF CURRICULUM:

The traditional concept of the curriculum represented the mastery over subjects, certain type of knowledge and skills, as the main objective of the educational programme. The teacher emphasized mastery over subject matter by the students according to a strict syllabus planned by the administrative system of the school.

1. Passing of examination was the goal.
2. The stress is on intellectual development, rather than on development of values 1,
3. The need of learner was not taken into consideration in planning the curriculum.
4. This type of curriculum is static and not adaptable to individual needs.
5. THE NEWER CONCEPTS OF CURRICULUM: According to the newer concepts of curriculum, education is a dynamic process, by which the learner is guided and helped to live in the present world making necessary adaptations, solving problems of life and being creative in planning and building one’s own future.

Education should include the various experiences the learner has in the school, outside the school, in the community and society in which one lives. In other words, the modern curriculum is learner cantered and not subject cantered. It is flexible according to changes in the environment 1,

1. CRITIERIA OF CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT:
2. Bhatia explains the ABC of curriculum as Articulation, Balance and Continuity.
3. Articulation:

Refers to correlation between subjects. Articulation in the organization of curriculum present mainly three problems. First is the interdisciplinary problems, Teaching of various subjects like anatomy, physiology, psychology etc. are done by different teachers, at different times of the day and each subjects is dealt as though they have no relationships with each other.

• Correlation necessitates cooperative planning and material help and understanding among teachers.
• Another area of poor articulation is in terms of theory and practice application.
• The student should be able to see that what is learned in theory classes have direct relationship with practical situations.

The inter relationship between the subjects, like anatomy and physiology applied to daily problems of living must be understood by the learners.

• A third articulation lies in the nature of the relationship between the school and the life outside the school community.
• Balance:
• Refers to the relation between the class room experience and learning experience outside the class or extracurricular activities like craft, arts or NCC.
• There should be proper balance between direct and indirect experiences, theory and practice, individual and social aims, subjects taught and time allotted and between core subjects and electives.

The balanced curriculum will be a broad field curriculum containing humanities, social sciences and natural sciences organized into “core” and “periphery” subjects or general and special areas giving freedom for learners to choose according to their interest.

1. Balance is the one which will help the students to meet all the needs of individuals – physical, intellectual, social, aesthetic, emotional and spiritual.
2. Continuity: This refers to the vertical relation of the major elements of curriculum.
3. The learners moves from one stage to the other, from one class to the other.

Learning must be a continuous process 2,

1. SOURCES OF CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT:
2. KLSSE
3. KNOWLEDGE:

It is central to curriculum development with rapid expansion of knowledge resulting from new research findings in various discipline, The curriculum has to be changed as often as necessary to learn new ways and means of learning and students must know how to select and apply knowledge in the practical aspects and keep up-to-date with the necessary information.

• LEARNERS: The first and the most important aspect to be considered in any curriculum is the human aspect of the curriculum in which the needs and capacities of individual pupils are recognized.
• Learners vary in their culture, intellectual capacities, needs and interest.
• SCIENCE: Every day new discoveries and inventories are bombarding the society.

Use of television, satellite and information network facilitate learning. Research findings and changes in practice areas especially in professional course content and skills to be learnt. SOCIETY: The cultural heritage values and ideals of society influence the objectives of education.

The socio economic background, the employment opportunities and the consumer’s need for services affect the curriculum and type of education provided. The major goal of education in the present world is the need for employment. The consumer demand for services are to be taken into consideration in preparing students for life activities especially in the job oriented, vocational and professional curricula.

EXTERNAL FORCES AND DIVINE : The policy makers, government, universities, institutions of higher education, professional colleges and statutory bodies are the external forces and outside agencies which influence curriculum planning 1, 3, CURRICULAM PLANNING: Planning of curriculum is the responsibility of the faculty of a college.

All the curricula of particular education which are prescribed by the statutory body may be the university in the state. In case of professional education the minimum required standard and experiences are prescribed by the concerned councils of the profession. Advancement of knowledge in various disciplines, research findings, changes in traditional customs, increasing availability of resources, all have effect on education, teaching and learning method.

What is learned today becomes redundant in future. Therefore modification of curriculum is essential if the programme offered by the school is to keep pace with the changing society. Research in curriculum planning and implementation is much needed.

• The conceptual model by Heidgerken depicts how the objectives of education are achieved through the educational process and the various dimensions of the process leading to desired outcome.5
• THE COMPONENTS OF EDUCATIVE PROCESS
• Figure 1: The components of education process

The components of the educative process are the learners, teacher and the subject matter. The subject matter is what is to be learned, the way it is to be learned and the setting in which is to be learned. Four dimensions in the educative process identified by Heidgerken (1965) are; 1.

1. The substantive dimensions (the curriculum) what is taught and what is learned.2.
2. The procedural dimensions.
3. It is the way and method.
4. It also includes the teachers and learners motivation leading to self-learning.3.
5. The environmental dimension it is the physical and social factors in which teaching and learning take place.

It includes all the learning environment like college, community and clinical laboratory.4. The human relation dimension It includes the interaction with various people in the environment, teachers, other students and administrative staff; all the individuals who play some role in the learning process 5,1,

1. BASIC CURRICULUM MODEL
2. Curriculum Planning:
3. The total curriculum plan should include, the overall objectives, objectives for each course units, lessons, type of learning experiences to provided methods of teaching, duration of each course and plan for evaluation.
4. Curriculum planning is a complex process involving many groups of people; like faculty, community leaders, subjects experts, consumers, students, employers of the prospective graduates, educationalist and psychologist 6,
5. The curium planned in various stages, planning of curriculum as a whole, planning of various courses and units and lessons for each area.

• Discipline :
• All academic activities, curricular and extra-curricular, which are planned, includes staff and other students rules and decisions, routines as well as physical environment like building etc and social environment like community and public opinion all constitute curriculum.
• Broad fields:

Curriculum is prepared by organizing subjects around new unifying centers, and bringing together subjects from different related subjects and grouping them under a new theme. Field selected for curriculum are humanities, social sciences and natural sciences.

Correlation process: It is an attempt to overcome the defects of the separate subject curriculum. With the aim to relate the various subjects so that each can better reinforce and complement the other.b. Learner centred design: Child centred : Teaching must be that organization of subject matter into units of projects which would create opportunities for self-activity on the parts of the students.

These should largerly replace the formal lesson. Experience centred : True learning is experiencing. It based on the needs and interests of learner is the surest means of effective learning. Experience means trying out. It describes what has been seen, felt, thought or done in a situation.c.

• Problem centred design: Life situation : Programme has the students.
• Findings common interest and working together of students bring about growth in life related skills.
• There is flexibility in the content and instructional methods and variety of resources such as newspaper, journals, libraries, excursion, and audio- video tapes.

Social problems: Development of social organization and moral development. Most of the fights and unhappy social situations which arise in the primary school is the result of lack of development of the social domain. Education should aim at development of social consciousness, character development of citizenship, ability to adopt to society and to be socially productive and of value to others 3,

1. Phases of Curriculum Development:
2. There are four phases such as:
3. 1. Planning phase
4. 2. Development phase
5. 3. Implementation phase
6. 4. Evaluation phase
7. Planning phase:

In this phase, there will be a involvement of administrators, faculty and students in the curriculum. Review the curriculum by a committee to identify areas that need to be changed. The objectives, learning experiences provided, teaching and learning activities need to be studied. To arrange for orientation programmes for the staff to prepare them for change and to overcome resistances.

• Development phase:
• Prior to constructing a curriculum, we should consider certain factors 7, They are:
• Factor relating to learners :
• Health
• Family
• Vocation
• Religion and culture
• Employment opportunities
• Social civic and economic aspects
• Psychological aspects and so on.
• Factors related to the teachers:
• Educational qualification
• Level of preparation
• Employment opportunities
• Social civic and economic aspects
• Psychological aspects,
• Factors related to the subjects:
• Subject content
• Hours for theory and practical’s
• Learning experiences
• Audio visual aids
• Method of teaching
• Evaluation
• Factors related to the environment:
• Physical environment
• Needs of the society
• National aspiration and needs
• Culture and changes in values
• Problems of the society
• Social changes
• Technological changes
• Economical changes
• Political changes
• Manpower need
• Factors related to the Resources available:
• Financial resources
• Human resources
• Material resources
• Government regulation and policies.6
• Implementation phase:

Once the curriculum plan has been finalized, the course modification steps have to be taken. Implemented by formulating objectives, course content, learning methods, teaching approaches and evaluation procedures. Behaviour changes expected in the students, with the implementation of the change have to be clearly stated.

New teaching method also may have to be accepted according to the change. Evaluation phase: It must be used to monitor the progress of the students learning to determine the extent to which the objectives have been achieved and to find ways of improving teaching learning methods. This will give feed back to the planners and should be used to further improvement of curriculum.1 REFERENCES: 1 DR.

Aleyamma Kurian George, Principles of Curriculum Development and Evaluation, Published by Vivekananda Achagam, 2004.

1. 2 Bhatia and Bhatia, Theory and Principles of Education, Douba Book House, Delhi 2000.
2. 3 Saffaya, Mathur et al, Development of Educational Theory and Practice, Dhanpat Rai and Sons Delhi, 1982.
3. 4 Tyler, Ralph, Basic Principles of Curriculum Construction, Chicago Press, 1949.

5 Heidgerkin, Lorreta, Teaching and Learning in Schools of Nursing Principles And Methods., J.B Lippincot, New York, 2002.

• 6 Neeraja KP, Textbook of Nursing Education, Jaypee Brothers Medical Publishers, New Delhi, 2009.
• 7 Taba, Hilda, Curriculum Development: Theory and Practice, New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1962.
• 8 Aggarval JC, Theory and Principles of Education, VIKAS Publishing House, New Delhi.

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What are the 3 major components of education for the future?

Effective teaching involves aligning the three major components of instruction: learning objectives, assessments, and instructional activities. – Taking the time to do this upfront saves time in the end and leads to a better course. Teaching is more effective and student learning is enhanced when (a) we, as instructors, articulate a clear set of learning objectives (i.e., the knowledge and skills that we expect students to demonstrate by the end of a course); (b) the instructional activities (e.g., case studies, labs, discussions, readings) support these learning objectives by providing goal-oriented practice; and (c) the assessments (e.g., tests, papers, problem sets, performances) provide opportunities for students to demonstrate and practice the knowledge and skills articulated in the objectives, and for instructors to offer targeted feedback that can guide further learning.
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Are important components of education?

Quality education for all the students involves three very important components. One is the emergence and the nurturing of life skills, not in the sense of vocational skills, but in the sense of problem-solving skills, creative and critical thinking skills, self-directed learning skills in the students.
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What is Components and example?

In programming and engineering disciplines, a component is an identifiable part of a larger program or construction. Usually, a component provides a particular function or group of related functions. In programming design, a system is divided into components that in turn are made up of modules,

Component test means testing all related modules that form a component as a group to make sure they work together. In object-oriented programming and distributed object technology, a component is a reusable program building block that can be combined with other components in the same or other computers in a distributed network to form an application.

Examples of a component include: a single button in a graphical user interface, a small interest calculator, an interface to a database manager. Components can be deployed on different servers in a network and communicate with each other for needed services.

Component interface exposure and discovery. Thus, during application use, one component can interrogate another one to discover its characteristics and how to communicate with it. This allows different companies (possibly independent service providers) to create components that can interoperate with the components of other companies without either having to know in advance exactly which components it will be working with. Component properties. This allows a component to make its characteristics publicly visible to other components. Event handling, This allows one component to identify to one or more other components that an event (such as a user pressing a button) has occurred so that the component can respond to it. In Sun’s example, a component that provided a button user interface for a finance application would “raise” an event when the button was pressed, resulting in a graph-calculating component gaining control, formulating a graph, and displaying it to the user. Persistence. This allows the state of components to be preserved for later user sessions. Application builder support. A central idea of components is that they will not only be easy and flexible for deploying in a distributed network, but that developers can easily create new components and see the properties of existing ones. Component packaging. Since a component may comprise several files, such as icons and other graphical files, Sun’s component model includes a facility for packaging the files in a single file format that can be easily administered and distributed. (Sun calls their component package a JAR (Java Archive) file format.)

This was last updated in November 2016
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What is the meaning of @component?

Element, component, constituent, ingredient mean one of the parts of a compound or complex whole.
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What is the most important component of teaching?

Free CT 1: Growth and Development – 1 10 Questions 10 Marks 10 Mins The most important component of the teaching-learning process is Learner as all the activities and the whole process is centered and planned around him. Important Points Learning-centered education focuses on the learning process. Although its primary concern is on the learning of the students, all those involved in the education of students such as teachers are also co-learners with the students in the learning-centered education. Key Points Characteristics of learner-centered teaching and learning​:

It stresses the importance of inquiry, observation, and investigation. It takes into account the learner’s capabilities, capacities, and preferred learning styles. It uses methods like experiential learning, problem-solving, concept mapping, and creative writing. In this method, teachers facilitate students as a facilitator by providing them with the proper environment and materials to learn at their own pace. Students work in flexible, cooperative groupings to solve problems to demonstrate an understanding of the task that ensures their holistic development. It refers to an education system that accommodates all children regardless of their physical, intellectual, social, emotional, linguistic, or other conditions. It’s based on the premise that learning is a right of every child and ensuring that no child is left behind in education. It refers to a learning environment where the students of different backgrounds (economically disadvantaged children, children from remote populations, children belonging to ethnic, linguistic, or cultural minorities, or children from other marginalized groups, gifted and weak students) learn together in the same class.

​Thus, option 3 is correct. Last updated on Nov 24, 2022 The Uttar Pradesh Basic Education Board (UPBEB) has released the UPTET Final Result for the 2021 recruitment cycle. The UPTET exam was conducted on 23rd January 2022. The UPBEB going to release the official notification for the UPTET 2022 soon on its official website.
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What is quality education paragraph?

Why we need quality education Education is the most important tool for the betterment of humanity as well as to develop modernization in civilization. In every government education is considered to be the most essential pillar that holds whole nation together and leads the state towards ultimate success.

1. Education is at the heart of both personal and community development; its mission is to enable each of us, without exception, to develop all our talents to the full and to realize our creative potentiality, including responsibility for our own lives and achievement of our personal aims.
2. Quality education enables students to develop all of their attributes and skills to achieve their potentiality as human beings and members of society.

Quality education therefore implies looking into what desirable changes the educational institution wants to make in each student. Setting a high standard and help the student work toward them. [Some special features of quality education: (1) Quality education is a human right and a public good, governments and other public authorities should ensure that a quality education service is available freely to all citizens from early childhood into adulthood.

• 2) Quality education provides the foundation for equity in society.
• 3) Quality education not only enlightens but also empowers citizens and enables them to contribute to the maximum extent possible to the social and economic development of their communities.
• 4) A quality education is one that focuses on the whole—the social, emotional, mental, physical and cognitive development of each student regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status or geographic location.

It prepares the child for life, not just for only learning outcomes. (5) Quality education provides resources and directs policy to ensure that each child enters school healthy and learns about and practices a healthy lifestyle; learns in an environment that is physically and emotionally safe for students and adults.

(6) Quality education provides the outcomes needed for individuals, communities, and societies to prosper. It allows schools to align and integrate fully with their communities and access a range of services across sectors designed to support the educational development of their students. (7) Quality education is supported by three key pillars: ensuring access to quality teachers; providing use of quality learning tools and professional development; and the establishment of safe and supportive quality learning environments.

People learn basic norms, rules, regulations, and values of society through education. Moreover, high quality education enables us to lead a successful life, enhances our intelligence, skills, knowledge, and brings positive changes in our life. We need good doctor’s good engineer’s good lawyers and good teachers after all good citizens one only ensuring availability of quality education.

1. Education expands our vision and creates awareness.
2. It helps us develop a disciplined life and provides us with better earning opportunities.
3. It enables us to know the world beyond our own surroundings.
4. Education is also a prerequisite of the prosperity and modernization of any country.
5. Modern education is based on the humanism, freedom, equality, democracy, and human rights.

The content of education keeps pace with the needs of modern society and is a mirror of its goals, values, and priorities. The present industrial society has opened up a plenty of occupations which require people with specialized skills and IT based knowledge.

Quality education identifies learners’ cognitive development as the major explicit objective of all education systems and emphasizes education’s role in promoting values and attitudes of responsible citizenship and in nurturing creative and emotional development. Education administrators have a responsibility to promote policies that integrate schools, communities, and nations into a system that supports development of the whole child, ensuring that each student is healthy, safe, engaged, supported, and challenged.

The challenge of improving quality of teaching by training teachers and supporting them with modern teaching aids, tools and methodologies – like smart classrooms and digital course content-needs to be taken up so that teachers take pride in their classroom performances smoothly.

The future of the country depends on a quality education being provided in every school and it plays a major role in the student education. Quality is at the heart of education, Alternatively Performance in licensure examinations is not the only measure of quality education. The quantity and quality of school inputs the effectiveness of the curriculum and teaching methods and the quality of the school and home environment.

On the basis of world`s context, reality is, about 124 million children across the world are out of school and 250 million children are not learning basic skills as a result of poor quality education. Girls, children with disabilities, those from minority groups and children living in poor and remote areas are most often denied access to quality education.

Despite some sorts of the above mentioned difficulties, our government has already been established educational institutions in every underserved areas of the country, providing stipend facility, training for the teachers, infrastructural development, ICT facilities, distributing free textbooks to the students and promotes free, equal access to quality education for all students from early learning to higher education and works with students, their families, communities, wider society patronizing to both local and international organizations so that all students are able to get a quality education as a whole.

There is no substitute for quality education for the overall economic, social and moral prosperity of a country. Only quality education can build students into skilled manpower in line with the international labor market. So there is no compromise in providing quality education – the government has to work on this policy.
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Why is quality education for all important?

Why does education matter? Education enables upward socioeconomic mobility and is a key to escaping poverty. Education helps reduce inequalities and reach gen- der equality and is crucial to fostering tolerance and more peaceful societies.
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Why is quality education important to us?

Education is a powerful weapon for changing lives and shaping the future. Good quality education is an essential tool for gaining the best knowledge and develop modernization in society. The outcomes of learning for individuals may vary based on different contexts but at the completion of the elementary education cycle, every person should imbibe basic life skills, scientific knowledge, and beginning levels of numeracy and literacy.

• Cambridge School, Noida, the best school in Noida always focuses on providing quality education and the best values to their students that help them become future leaders.
• Admission open now! Features of good quality education: • It lays the foundation for equity in civilization.
• This is possible by breaking the poverty cycle, reducing inequalities, and achieving gender equality.

• It is the key to meeting the goals of standard global development. • It makes the students capable of contributing their best in both individual and community developments. It focuses on the social, mental, physical, emotional, cognitive, and economic development of every learner irrespective of their race, ethnicity, gender, geographical location, or socioeconomic status.

Through quality education, an individual can seek better job opportunities, progress with sustainable livelihoods, and have a healthy lifestyle. Best delivered education spurs innovative minds. • Well-educated masses can tolerate the resilience of the communities and become a part of a peaceful democratic society.

• It allows the prosperity of individuals, communities, and society as a whole. Features of good schools: At Cambridge School, the best CBSE school in Noida teachers are committed to their work and keep on delivering the updated knowledge which they handle in the classroom.

Their performance is made better with the use of modern teaching tools and methodologies such as smart classrooms and digitalized content of the course. Admission open now! • Special attention is given by teachers to every student to assist them spiritually, psychologically, socially, and nutritionally, among others.

• There is a contribution in the learning of the child from both school and home by cooperation between the academic environment and family members. • Extracurricular activities are well-organized to improve the skills. Outside space is made necessary for sports and social training.

• The learning climate is conducive i.e.
• The requirements in terms of infrastructure, modern facilities, the operational environment, and human resources are available according to the child’s satisfaction.
• The school takes disciplinary actions against all the fault-committing students based on the fair rules.

How can quality education be attained? Three supportive pillars of quality education can lead the nation towards success. The ways by which quality education can be available at every doorstep includes: • Easy access to good quality teachers that teach in a child-friendly way to make students reach their full potential.

It also requires active participation from the children’s end. • Availability of good study materials and use of quality learning tools for professional development of every student. • A Foundation (i.e. good schools) with supportive, safe, and standard learning environments. • Successful quality education requires certain initiatives to be taken: • Every country shall prioritize the idea that “learning is mandatory for all”.

• The government must ensure that every child enrolls and attends schools. • Making and implementation of certain strict and concrete policies to address the dire crisis in developing countries in the education sector. • Issue of educational reforms and their persistence.
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What are the characteristics of quality education?

In all countries, however, quality content should include several pivotal areas. These include literacy, numeracy, life skills and peace education — as well as science and social studies. Literacy. Literacy, or the ability to read and write, is often considered one of the primary goals of formal education.
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What are the main indicators of quality education?

Understanding what quality means varies between countries. Different education actors and organizations also have their own definitions. However, most tend to agree on three broad principles: the need for relevance, for equity of access and outcome, and for proper observance of individual rights (UNESCO, 2004). UNESCO’s framework on the variables of education quality has five dimensions:

1. Learner Characteristics : including learner aptitude, perseverance, readiness for school, prior knowledge, barriers to learning, and demographic variables.
2. Context : including public resources for education, parental support, national standards, labour market demands, socio-cultural and religious factors, peer effects, and time available for schooling and homework.
3. Enabling Inputs : including teaching and learning materials, physical infrastructure and facilities, and human resources.
4. Teaching and Learning : including learning time, teaching methods, assessment, and class size.
5. Outcomes : including skills in literacy and numeracy, values, and life skills. (UNESCO, 2004: 36).

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What is the best definition of quality?

Quality is the degree to which an object or entity (e.g., process, product, or service) satisfies a specified set of attributes or requirements. The quality of something can be determined by comparing a set of inherent characteristics with a set of requirements.
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Why is quality education for all important?

Why does education matter? Education enables upward socioeconomic mobility and is a key to escaping poverty. Education helps reduce inequalities and reach gen- der equality and is crucial to fostering tolerance and more peaceful societies.
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What is top quality education?

Defining A High Quality Education for All StudentsTestimony prepared for the Public Hearing of the Joint Committee to Develop a Master Plan for Education: Kindergarten through University I want to thank the Joint Committee for their invitation to testify and to engage in a thoughtful discussion about high quality education.

1. The Academic Senate for California Community Colleges represents the local academic senates of all 108 colleges.
2. We provide expertise in academic and professional matters to the Chancellor and Board of Governors as well as to the Legislature and Governor’s Office.
3. The Academic Senate for California Community Colleges urges the Committee to beware of quick fixes or simple solutions; we believe there are no shortcuts in education.

As much testimony before the Committee has already stated, while it is essential to attend to outcomes, the move to look only at outcomes, without attention to the requisite educational support structures to ensure them, will shortchange our students.

The best schools encourage creativity, support inventiveness and open ended inquiry: the ability, as the current clich puts it, to think “out of the box,” not merely the ability to bubble it in.This intellectual legacy is the hallmark of the higher educational system in the United States, and it is the right of all to inherit it, not a narrowed, quantitative, or numbers driven reduction.The point of a quality education is to help our students master a basic proficiency level to be sure, but more than that, it is to encourage the development of their humanity.

The Academic Senate for California Community Colleges, in its paper, “The Future of the Community College: A Faculty Perspective,” identified a quality education as one that is “maximally productive of humane values and which contributes toward students becoming informed, compassionate and productive members of their communities.

The faculty believe.that democracy requires an educated citizenry, literate people who are capable of making informed choices, and that the development of such citizens should be the primary task of a `democratic’ educational system.” (p.5) `Education’ is defined in the paper as “the actualizing of the potential of human beings.” In other words, a quality education is one that facilitates individuals’ becoming more fully themselves.

“Thus a good indicator of such an education is what the ancient Greeks called eudaimonia, a word which is often translated as `happiness,’ but which is best understood as that sense of well-being that accompanies a state of spiritual and physical wholeness, an awareness that one is exactly who one ought to be.” (p.5).

It is true that such a definition and such indicators do not lend themselves readily to a quantitative assessment. The point to be made here was perhaps best put by a legislator from Oregon at a conference on performance-based funding, sponsored by the Education Commission of the States and held in San Francisco in the fall of 1999.

“We have abandoned performance-based funding based on quantitative outcomes,” the legislator said, “because we have found that the kinds of things you can measure are completely irrelevant to a quality education.” This is a lesson that has not yet been learned in California.

Similarly, an inordinate focus on one aspect of education, for example casting vocational education too narrowly as training, can produce workers who in the short term will help actualize the potential of industry, but will not be prepared to actualize their own potential. While we are concerned with the building of skills, and specific occupational training, our view is to the long-term development of students, the creation of career ladders across the economic and educational institutions that give them the best hope of having choices, making contributions, and having fulfilling lives.

We need not only to help our students access jobs, but also to prepare them for careers. In every interaction with our students, we should be thinking of the broad span of their lives. To do otherwise is to run the danger of allowing in the community colleges a socioeconomic tracking system designed to create and sustain a permanent underclass.

We insist that the community colleges be gateways to the fulfillment of people’s quest for whole and fulfilling lives. We need to address the longitudinal development of students. The community colleges are the institutions best designed to address this. Unfortunately, low level entry jobs are created in our society much more rapidly than high paying careers with a future.

The community colleges have economic development as part of the mission; we have shown that we are a part of the real engine of the state’s economy. But this aspect of our mission needs to be matched by a commitment to create viable, sustainable communities.

• The community colleges are an essential institution of stability in any community; and it is a reciprocal responsibility of industry to serve education as well as for community colleges to serve business and industry.
• It is within this larger context that we would place a discussion of testing and assessment.

As the Committee’s materials note, the “assessment of learning is an imperfect science, one that has not yet evolved into measures that are commonly understood and easily transferable to different types of institutions.” As you note, assessment and accountability are not the same thing.

• Efforts to improve one need not come at the expense of the other.
• We must, of course, measure the right things.
• For example, an exclusive focus on testing purely academic rather than applied skills can unfairly disadvantage vocational students, as is apparent in the current K-12 testing controversies.

Much more attention needs to be paid to what are authentic and valid measures of a sound education. We would argue that everything that matters within an institution should not be viewed through the lens of how it contributes to student performance on a test, or any other single criterion.

• We view with increasing alarm the equation of testing with excellence-it is a threshold perhaps, but not excellence.
• Excellence occurs when one goes above and beyond, when we encourage students to achieve, to pull for the best in themselves.
• We are similarly concerned about the push for standardized testing across all segments of education.

The community colleges have long been committed to the use of multiple measures in testing of our students. We believe multiple measures are an essential component of assessment, whether of students or of institutions. We believe that no one measure should determine a person’s fate.

At the community colleges we use a diverse battery of procedures and methods for gathering information about students. The measures we use are both subjective and objective. And the tests we use must be locally validated against our curriculum. We require that the measures, taken together, are fair and sensitive to cultural and language differences.

The measures should be used as advisory tools to assist students in selecting educational options, not to exclude them from opportunities or further education. Our approach to testing is for placement purposes, not sorting for exclusion. Attention to outcomes measures in education is a welcome and important addition, but while it might help reduce budgets, by itself it is not enough to ensure quality.

Outcomes are indicators, yes, but only partial ones. In fact, in isolation, emphasis on outcomes can drive institutions, administrators and faculty to pursue quantity over quality, to play numbers games, and reduce overall rigor, balance and quality in order to shine on selected measures. And, the Academic Senate is concerned that without a corresponding concern for rigor, standards and sound educational practices and processes, our Partnership for Excellence program will become a partnership for mediocrity.

A sound approach must include encouragement of learning outcomes assessment but also pay attention to all of the base line standards of quality and integrity. Similarly, the evaluation of institutions (be they K-12 or higher education) should avoid singular measures.

• As Wellman notes, “One strength of accreditation historically is that it has avoided one dimensional measures of quality, instead.
• Demonstrate performance in a variety of areas, including curriculum, faculty, finances, governance and student services.
• Academic freedom, institutional commitment to the public interest, and other important aspects evaluated through the governance standard should not be sidestepped.

” (J. Wellman, Chronicle of Higher Education, Sep 22, 2000) Establishing and explaining the standards that apply for degrees and certificates, ensuring integrity in governance, including whether governing boards are doing the jobs they should be doing and whether the principles of academic freedom are respected in public or private institutions-these are all measures of quality.

Fiscal accountability must also be front and center; and it must be monitored directly, not only through the circuitous route of test scores or graduation rates. The Academic Senate believes a quality education is one that affords both depth and breadth. The liberal arts are critical to student development.

We believe general education is even more important now, as it promotes the very qualities required in our ever complex and changing society. These qualities, in fact, are what employers want, and beyond that, are the keys to full and rewarding lives.

1. In your briefing paper you posit tolerance as a key measure of diversity.
2. Tolerance is a start, but it’s not nearly enough.
3. To be excellent, education must actively embrace and develop deep cultural understandings.
4. A commitment to diversity and the cultivation of such understandings must be both an explicit part of curriculum, and an implicit element of instructional and institutional design, from the educational materials to the achievements of the students, from the composition of the faculty and staff to the opportunity structure itself.

Equity must be a central value. And equity of outcomes is key. When assessing outcomes, care must be taken to bring all students up to comparable levels of achievement. The Academic Senate has a deep concern that student equity dropped out of Partnership for Excellence, so that there is an emphasis on increasing outputs, but no requirement that the outcomes are spread across all populations.

This should be corrected by requiring attention to equity in achievement by demographic group in the setting of goals and reporting of progress. Equity of inputs is also essential; it is incumbent upon the state to provide all with equitable opportunity structures. Community college students deserve the same investment in their education as those at CSU and UC.

Their intrinsic worth is the same; the state should value them in equal measure. We urge the Commission to bring community colleges up to similar undergraduate funding levels as UC and CSU. There is a nearly 3 to 1 ratio of undergraduate funding per FTES between UC and the community colleges.

Asking us to do more with less won’t work, and it is fundamentally unfair. Equity of access must be maintained; this means building viable institutions with the capacity to serve growing number of students. We must work to keep the doors open, and the lights on. The opportunity to progress to successive stages of education hinges upon having sufficient classes and programs open to students in the community colleges.

It also will require investment in student services infrastructure, counseling, advising, financial aid and other support structures. For students to succeed, they need encouragement, and mentoring; teaching and learning are relational activities. A quality education is about the nourishing of dreams along with the requisite skills and tools.

1. A quality education pays attention to the affective as well as the cognitive aspects of learning.
2. The confidence that comes with achievement must be nurtured and translated into a sense of entitlement and empowerment, of personal agency.
3. We must take a broad notion of the critical capacities of our students.

Our students need frameworks of thought, to be able to organize and use information, not just memorize it. They must learn how to ask questions effectively, formulate hypotheses, evaluate evidence, and derive conclusions. They must be able to apply these within specific disciplines and vocational contexts.

Students must learn how to approach and deal with ambiguity. Education is about the development of habits of mind as well as heart, the integration of experience and insight, the cultivation of resilience. While many think our system is too complex, we believe our strength lies in the multiple paths to achievement afforded by the community colleges.

These colleges are for re-entry students, as well as for recent high school graduates; for those who never completed high school as well as for those with higher degrees returning for further study. We would urge you caution regarding the increasing pressures to standardize, be it in curriculum or testing.

We recognize these come from good intentions: the need to ease articulation and movement of students across our systems. We share these concerns. Together, the Academic Senates of the three systems are engaged in many efforts to address the need for smooth student transition, most notably the IMPAC project designed to determine the discipline competencies for pretransfer major preparation, and another project to determine the expected competencies for entering freshman in writing and reading across all disciplines.

But we would urge you to remember that this must be balanced with concern for the local and particular needs of communities of learners. Courses are not interchangeable parts, to be further reduced to modules that can be put on disk. The relationship between the courses is the tissue that holds the curriculum together.

• The creation of the curriculum is an essential, and collective, expression of a college community.
• It is troublesome to us that increasing pressures toward homogenization and standardization are not balanced by a corresponding understanding of the need for teaching and learning materials and strategies well matched to the given students and communities.

Or recognition of the need for constant revision, creativity and innovation in a world of accelerating change. A strength of the community colleges has been its ability, relative to other segments of education, to be responsive to the particular students and communities served.

• Tailoring our curriculum, along with experimenting in occupational and workforce development have been among our hallmarks.
• As Norton Grubb points out, the push to standardize curriculum and requirements at the state level is pursued to help students in their transition from one institution to another, but it can undermine the efforts of any one college to create integrated contexts in which students can learn.

This is particularly troublesome given the nature of our student body. Given the demands of family and work, it is difficult for our students to sustain connection to the college community. Increasing numbers of them are drifting from institution to institution, part time students all too often taught by parttime faculty.

• Grubb, Honored but Invisible: An Inside Look at Community College Teaching, 352-55) Their lives stymie efforts to create coherent educational experiences; they come from communities often overwhelmed and stressed by the rapid social changes emanating from the new economy.
• These disintegrative and centrifugal forces are outside the control of the community colleges, but institutional practices that support good teaching and effective educational programs can help.” (Grubb, 352-55) Connection is what our students need: to each other, to teachers, to the historical dramas of humanity across varied disciplines and cultures.

Connection to the cumulative set of skills and techniques in and about the material and intellectual worlds. Connection ultimately to oneself and one’s place in the world. Well-designed educational experiences heighten the opportunities for students to make such connections.

Considerable evidence is mounting that interdisciplinary and integrated models of education hold the best promise for helping students make these connections, but these by definition are locally developed. The key lies in articulating the emergent competencies and requirements across systems, not in reducing the variation of approach and delivery within each.

Both Alexander Astin and Vincent Tinto have argued that beyond the demographic variables associated with student success, the most powerful predictor of student retention is contact and interaction with faculty members. When students interact with teachers-inside and outside of the classroom, the library, the counseling office-they gain a sense of each other and of themselves.

The more involved students are as tutors, student representatives, or in other organized groups and events, the more likely they are to persist toward their goals, and make it to the next stage of achievement. As Astin has shown, the engaged learner is the most successful. Several speakers today have stressed that we must pay attention to the whole learning environment.

A quality education is one that invests in the educational community-the entire support structure necessary to uphold the curriculum and instructional process. This must include investment in faculty: full time, well qualified, and with ongoing professional development opportunities.

It also means investment and support for students’ full lives; increasingly this will need to include consideration of housing, access to computer technology and childcare for adult learners. The conditions of quality education are far more sweeping than has been explored in the briefing paper. They must include institutional climates of open inquiry, mutual respect and the expectation and appreciation of professional and personal excellence.

It is time to match the rhetoric with real commitment to reforms that support teaching and institutional practices that improve the quality of teaching. We would agree with Grubb that “effective developmental programs are the only way to achieve high standards in open access institutions.

1. These probably entail replacing ineffective skills and drills with more social and collective conceptions, including learning communities, and other resource intensive investments.” And, these require more, not less, faculty, and more, not less connection to teachers.
2. Grubb) Responsive curriculum, interdisciplinary approaches, learning communities and service learning are all labor intensive and dynamic activities.

Learning communities cannot be sustained without investment for blocked classes, team teaching and smaller class sizes. Professional development that is centered on improvement of instruction and faculty driven is needed at all our colleges. Mentoring of new full- and part-time faculty is also essential.

Sustained programs of faculty development, and investment of resources into teaching and learning centers have proven efficacious in improving student outcomes. But faculty also need time and opportunity to engage in these activities. The provision of resources to support faculty in this work is essential.

The current teaching loads and class sizes in California community colleges make this very difficult. Faculty teach five classes (or 15 units) per semester, compared the national workload average of four classes (or 12 units); and we have on average 10 more students per class than the national average.

We have witnessed a decade of recession, and extremely conservative ideologies regarding taxation and public expenditures. Of stingy policies and attempts to starve public education. Of rationalizations for the growing divide between rich and poor. Just as the most diverse set of students in the history of the nation comes through our halls, we have encountered notions that they must perform, cannot take too long, must prove their worthiness, or even, as one recent report put it, are “drains on the public resources.” But we would argue they are our resources.

We must continue to stress the community component of community colleges. It has long been part of our uniqueness-that we are community based. In our colleges you’ll find the vibrancy of hope in the intersection of cultures and the cauldrons of social mobility that have made us great as institutions.

1. But a central component has been neglected too often: protecting the space for democratic dialogue, the climate of inquiry and safety for controversial ideas.
2. We must not shed our responsibility to provide the great service of cultural openness and intellectual discourse to communities increasingly without other venues for critical agency and voice.

The traditions of academic freedom and inquiry are more than traditions: they are the central gift of a free society. These must be kept alive, nurtured, fiercely protected not just in the star-studded halls of elite universities, but as the birthright of broad masses of people.

• That is our job and it is a noble one.
• The community colleges are the infrastructure of democracy.
• But we have been buffeted and compromised.
• The dream is alive but tattered, our institutions threadbare.
• The genius of the California community colleges has been the comprehensive mission -where the boundaries between occupational and academic education are permeable, where students can dream beyond expectation, where upward mobility is a daily interaction.

These dreams must continue to be translated into real opportunity, and that is only possible when all students, not just a few, are given full and rounded educational exposures, that foster the ability to adapt to changing economic circumstances, not only narrow skill sets that will be outmoded at an ever accelerating rate.

1. The Academic Senate for California Community Colleges commends the Master Plan Committee for its commitment to address the educational needs of the whole state, from earliest experiences to lifelong learning.
2. We urge you to push for the best, for all, and never to settle for less for the broad numbers of our people.

The community colleges stand at the intersection of the future of this state. We are in your hands. These are precious institutions that took generations a century to build. In communities that are under stress, they can be the nexus of reconnection and renewal, and they are worth pitched battles to defend.

About them we must be fiercely maternal. Our job is to protect and to improve them. We cannot tolerate their further degradation. Our job is to strengthen and enlarge them, and in doing so to enlarge all of our humanity. Joint Committee to Develop a Master Plan for Education – Kindergarten through University Senate Members: Senator Dede Alpert (Chair) Senator Betty Karnette Senator Wm.J.

`Pete’ Knight Senator Bruce McPherson Senator Kevin Murray Senator Jack O’Connell Senator Charles Poochigian Senator John Vasconcellos Assembly Members: Assemblymember Elaine Alquist (Co-Vice Chair Higher Education) Assemblymember Virginia Strom-Martin (Co-Vice Chair K-12 issues) Assemblymember Lynn Daucher Assemblymember Dean Florez Assemblymember Lynne C.
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How do you measure education quality?

Quality of Education The data and research currently presented here is a preliminary collection or relevant material. We will further develop our work on this topic in the future (to cover it in the same detail as for example our entry on, If you have expertise in this area and would like to contribute, to join us as a researcher.

1. Increases to the quantity of education – as measured for example by mean years of schooling – has, for a long time, been the central focus of policy makers and academic debate.
2. While increasing the access to education is important, the actual goal of providing schooling is to teach skills and transfer knowledge to students in the classroom.

This entry focusses on the outcomes of schooling – the quality of education. While we have good empirical data on the access to education we know much less about the quality of education. Unfortunately, the data on the skills and knowledge of students is sparse and has limited spatial and temporal coverage.

This is in part due to the difficulty and cost of creating and implementing standardized assessments that can be compared across borders and time. Efforts to measure these outcomes are geographically more restricted (often only OECD countries are included) and even less is known about how the performance of students with respect to these outcomes has changed over time.

A third limitation is that measures are sometimes not comparable between countries. Most often these assessment are measuring learning outcomes of one or several of the following three dimensions:

• Reading and language proficiency
• Mathematics and numeracy proficiency
• Scientific knowledge and understanding

The assessments differ in respect to how children are selected. While some assessments select children by their age, there are other assessments which select children by the school grade the child attends. The aim of these studies is to test a representative random sample of the intended population.

The most widely available metric on the outcomes of education is literacy. Data and research on literacy is discussed in detail in, The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) assessment, which is coordinated by the OECD, is the most well known international assessment of learning outcomes.

The first PISA study was carried out in 1997 and since then it was repeated every three years. The study is not select students by grade, but by age and only tests 15-year-olds, whatever their school level. In a two-hour assessment the competencies in reading, mathematics and science of these students are assessed.

• It is a very substantial undertaking and until 2017 “half a million students representing 28 million 15-year-olds in 72 countries and economies have participated in PISA”,
• The coverage of PISA can be seen in on the results in the reading dimension, it obviously includes the richer OECD countries and unfortunately only few poorer countries.

Poorer countries are also not tested regularly and were only participating in one round only and additionally it can be the case that for poorer countries not students from the entire country were selected, but instead only from particular regions. PISA, as well as TIMSS, are standardizing their results so that the average score of students from OECD countries is 500 and the student standard deviation is 100.

Assuming a normal distribution of measurement outcomes this means 68% of OECD students are reaching scores in the range between 400 and 600. While TIMSS focuses on content that is covered in the school curriculum PISA aims to “assesses the application of skills to real-life problems” and “emphasizes the importance of the context in which students should be able to use their skills (schools, home and society)”.

PISA tests the students in three different dimensions, which they define as follows:

• ” Science literacy is defined as the ability to engage with science-related issues, and with the ideas of science, as a reflective citizen. A scientifically literate person is willing to engage in reasoned discourse about science and technology, which requires the competencies to explain phenomena scientifically, evaluate and design scientific enquiry, and interpret data and evidence scientifically.
• Reading literacy is defined as students’ ability to understand, use, reflect on and engage with written texts in order to achieve one’s goals, develop one’s knowledge and potential, and participate in society.
• Mathematical literacy is defined as students’ capacity to formulate, employ and interpret mathematics in a variety of contexts. It includes reasoning mathematically and using mathematical concepts, procedures, facts and tools to describe, explain and predict phenomena. It assists individuals in recognising the role that mathematics plays in the world and to make the well-founded judgements and decisions needed by constructive, engaged and reflective citizens.”

Cross country comparability of the PISA results When the PISA study includes non-OECD countries it is often the case that students are not selected from the entire country, but instead only from selected regions within that country. Results reported for China – – in fact are only based on four Chinese provinces: Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu and Guangdong.

These regions are not representative of China as a whole and there is every reason to expect that students from these provinces have access to better education than the average Chinese 15-year-olds. The four regions are among the very richest regions of China and incomes are, Similarly when PISA reported on “India” in 2009 the assessments were made in two states of India only (Himachal Pradesh and Tamil Nadu).

The three maps show the results for the three subjects in which students are assessed. To describe the distribution of proficiency within countries PISA segments the achieved outcomes into levels of proficiency. To achieve higher levels, students need to be able to solve tasks of increasing complexity.

• Below level 1B (below or equal to 262)
• level 1B (higher than 262)
• level 1A (higher than 335)
• level 2 (higher than 407)
• level 3 (higher than 480)
• level 4 (higher than 553)
• level 5 (higher than 626)
• level 6 (higher than 698)

The visualization shows the distribution of students proficiency levels in 2009, 2012, and 2015. It is possible to see the data for other countries by choosing the ‘change country’ option on the chart. The test scores of the worst and best performing students in each country are correlated as this visualization shows.

Countries in which the top students perform better than top students in other countries tend to be the same countries in which the worst students also perform better than the worst students in other countries. As the name says, TIMSS is an assessment of the mathematics and science knowledge of students.

As the closely linked PIRLS it is carried out by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA). While PISA selects the assessed students by age and focusses on 15-year olds, TIMMS selects students by the grade they attend and tests students in Grades 4, 8, and in their final year.

TIMSS started slightly earlier than PISA. The first TIMSS was conducted in 1995 and covered 45 national educational systems. Later rounds included more countries – the 2011 round included 77 countries/area. The coverage of TIMSS is similar to PISA and includes mostly richer countries which are part of the OECD and only few poorer countries.

The coverage of TIMSS can be seen in on the results in the science dimension. Precursors to TIMSS were already conducted from 1964 onwards. The PIRLS is the other major study carried out by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA).

1. Here the objective is to assess primary school students in reading proficiency.
2. PIRLS only started in 2001.
3. LLECE is an assessment carried out only in Latin American countries.
4. This map shows the,
5. More information on LLECE is published by the UNESCO,
6. The OECD also surveys the skills of adults.
7. Is the world map showing the level of numeracy of adults that gives an idea of the covered area.

More information on PIAAC can be found, PASEC, which in the original French refers to Programme d’ Analyse des Systèmes Educatifs, has assessed educational outcomes in 13 countries in Francophone West Africa, is a map of outcomes in the dimension of the French language.

EGRA and EGMA are simple, low-cost assessments of literacy and numeracy. APRESt is a large-scale randomized evaluation in the Indian state of Andra Pradesh that has been carried out since 2004. ASER is a report that is based on a survey of more than 500,000 children in rural areas across India, It is not a school-based, but instead an in-home assessment of the reading and mathematical skills of children between 3 and 16.

The first ASER was carried out in 2005. UWEZO is an adaptation of ASER carried out in three east African countries (Tanzania, Uganda, and Kenya). It has been done since 2009 and is carried out annually. An assessment carried out by education ministries from fifteen southern and eastern African countries,

• The study assesses students in grade 6 in the domains of reading and mathematics.
• The first study was carried out in 1995.
• The studies’ website is: Measuring learning outcomes in a way that enables us to make comparisons across countries and time is difficult.
• There are several international standardised tests that try to measure learning outcomes in a systematic way across countries; but these tests are relatively new, and they tend to cover only specific geographical areas and skills.

One possible approach to learn from all these overlapping but disparate international and regional tests, is to put them on a consistent scale, and then pool them together across skills to maximize coverage across years and countries. This is exactly what Nadir Altinok, Noam Angrist and Harry Patrinos did in a new working paper:,

• They collected data from a large set of psychometrically-robust international and regional student achievement tests available since 1965, and they linked them together in a common measurement system.
• Here we show some key charts using their data.
• You can read more about their approach and results in our blog post,

A comparison of learning outcomes, country by country This chart plots GDP per capita (after adjusting for differences in prices across countries and time), against average student test scores (after homogenizing and pooling international and regional student assessments across education levels and subjects).

• As we can see, learning outcomes tend to be much higher in richer countries; but differences across countries are very large, even among countries with similar income per capita.
• The evolution of learning outcomes over time
• This scatter plot compares national average learning outcomes in 1985 and 2015 (or closest years with available data).

Among these countries we see a broad positive trend: Most bubbles are above the diagonal line, which means the majority of countries have seen improvements in learning outcomes over the last couple of decades. This is a great accomplishment! It shows that policies matter and learning outcomes can, and often do improve.

1. The error margin on these differences is often large, so small deviations from the diagonal line are not significant.
2. But it is worrying that many low-performing countries are substantially below the diagonal line.
3. Consider the comparison between Chile and Burkina Faso in the center of the chart: Both countries had similar average scores a couple of decades ago, but while Chile has improved, Burkina Faso has regressed.

You can check country by country trends over time in, Student achievement beyond average scores This chart shows the share of students who achieve minimum proficiency (i.e. the proportion who pass a global benchmark for minimum skills), against the share who achieve advanced proficiency (i.e.

The proportion who pass a global benchmark for advanced skills). Here we see that those countries where a larger share of students attain minimum proficiency, tend to also be countries where a larger share of students attain advanced proficiency. Better education lifts all boats. Low-income, low-performing countries are clustered at the bottom of the global scale: the distribution of test scores within these countries is shifted down, relative to high-performing countries.

The challenges are therefore much larger in these countries. Less than half of students in Sub-Saharan Africa reach the minimum global threshold of proficiency; and very, very few students achieve advanced skills. Rich countries, on the other hand, tend to be less clustered.

1. For example, Belgium and Canada have roughly similar average outcomes; but Canada has a higher share of students that achieve minimum proficiency, while Belgium has a larger share of students who achieve advanced proficiency.
2. This shows that there is significant information that average scores fail to capture.

The implication is that it’s not enough to focus on average outcomes to assess challenges in education quality. You can compare achievement above minimum, intermediate, and advanced benchmarks, country by country and over time, in these three line charts: The education economists Eric Hanushek and Ludger Wößmann combined the results from educational achievement tests to investigate the question whether the quality of education has a causal influence on the growth of the economy.

The database the authors published – and which is available on the – includes measure for 77 countries. shows their main test score. They extend earlier efforts by Hanushek and Kimko (2000) published in the American Economic Review. For African countries Sandefur (2016) constructed internationally comparable mathematics scores.

In every country and in every year girls achieved higher PISA test scores in reading. The difference of sometimes more than 50 points is substantial as the test scores are standardized to have a standard deviation of 100 points. In mathematics the difference between girls and boys is much more mixed than in the reading dimension. One interesting aspect of school performance is the effect of family environments and culture on students exam performance. A study by John Jerrim finds that children of East Asian immigrants to Australia outperform their native counterparts in the PISA tests.

1. In mathematics, he finds them to be ahead by 100 points representing two and a half years of education.
2. This evidence suggests that the differences highlighted by PISA and the IEA may be driven by cultural or family factors rather than the schooling systems.
3. There exists a substantial literature on the effects of competition on school quality and performance.

Whether choice improves school quality remains an open question in economics. In general we might expect that more schools might be better for outcomes through competitive forces, however this relies on both schools and parents responding to the increased competition/choice.

On the demand side, parents need some way of observing school quality accurately as well as the ability to change schools. Meanwhile, schools need some incentive to respond to any increase in competition. This is especially important since most public school systems lack any profit motive. Much of the research into the effects of competition rely on indirect measures of demand for high quality schools such as local rents and house prices.

Disaggregating the willingness to pay for better schools from neighbourhood effects and sociodemographic factors is highly technical and relies on models of sorting. For more information on these models see Rothstein (American Economic Review, 2006), Bayer and McMillan (NBER, 2005), and Bayer et al.

• NBER, 2007).
• An alternative approach has been to use variables correlated with school competition but independent of the other the demand and supply factors to disaggregate the different effects of choice (instrumental variables approach).
• For more information on this approach please see Hoxby (American Economic Review, 2000) and Rothstein (American Economic Review, 2007).

Recent research however suggests that the link between resources and school quality is not simple. The OECD looked into whether money can buy stronger PISA test performance. They concluded that the most important factor in PISA test performance is how resources are used: countries that prioritized the quality of teachers over class sizes performed much better.

1. An argument made by Eric Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann is that the lack of any straightforward relationship between resources and school outcomes indicates a minimum resource requirement.
2. Once the resource threshold has been reached, additional expenditure has little or no returns to school quality — instead, teacher quality and other constraints matter far more.
3. The following scatter shows average spending per student from the age of 6 to 15 against reading test scores in 2009.

The education economists Eric Hanushek and Ludger Wößmann combined the results from educational achievement tests to investigate the question whether the quality of education has a causal influence on the growth of the economy. The visualization shows the correlation between the quality of education, as measured by Hanushek and Woessmann, and the level of prosperity of the country in 2016.

• Data: Comprehensive data on enrollments, out-of-school children, repetition, completion, gender, teachers, education expenditures, learning outcomes, educational attainment, education equality, literacy, population, labor, and EMIS.
• Geographical coverage: Global by country
• Time span: since 1999
• Available at:

• Data: indicators on educational attainment, enrolment, attendance, teachers, financing and more
• Geographical coverage: Global, over 200 countries
• Time span: 1970 to most recent data year; Projections to 2050
• Available at: It is online

• Data : Standardised assessment scores for mathematics, reading and science
• Geographical coverage: OECD countries and other partners
• Time span: since 2000 (conducted every three years)
• Available at:

1. Cited from PISA 2015 Results (Volume II) Policies and Practices for Successful Schools, Online,
2. Hanushek, E.A. and Woessmann, L. (2012) – Do better school lead to more growth? Cognitive skills, economic outcomes, and causation, In Journal of Economic Growth, 17, 267–321. The paper is available and,
3. Hanushek, E.A., & Kimko, D.D. (2000) – Schooling, labor force quality, and the growth of nations, American Economic Review, 90(5), 1184–1208.
4. Sandefur (2016) – Internationally Comparable Mathematics Scores for Fourteen African Countries. Available as a,
5. This visualization is taken from Hanushek, Eric A., and Ludger Wößmann. “The role of education quality for economic growth.” World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 4122 (2007). Available online, The data shown is originally published by The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Source: U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences (2008).
6. Jerrim, John. “Why do East Asian children perform so well in PISA? An investigation of Western-born children of East Asian descent.” Oxford Review of Education ahead-of-print (2015): 1-24. Available online,
7. Rothstein, Jesse M.2006. “Good Principals or Good Peers? Parental Valuation of School Characteristics, Tiebout Equilibrium, and the Incentive Effects of Competition among Jurisdictions.” American Economic Review, 96(4): 1333-1350. Available online, Bayer, Patrick, and Robert McMillan. Choice and competition in local education markets, No. w11802. National Bureau of Economic Research, 2005. Available online, Bayer, Patrick, Fernando Ferreira, and Robert McMillan. A unified framework for measuring preferences for schools and neighborhoods, No. w13236. National Bureau of Economic Research, 2007. Available online,
8. Hoxby, Caroline M.2000. “Does Competition among Public Schools Benefit Students and Taxpayers?” American Economic Review, 90(5): 1209-1238. Available online, Rothstein, Jesse.2007. “Does Competition Among Public Schools Benefit Students and Taxpayers? Comment.” American Economic Review, 97(5): 2026-2037. Available online,
9. Heckman, James J. “Policies to foster human capital.” Research in economics 54, no.1 (2000): 3-56. Available online,
10. Hanushek, Eric A., and Ludger Wößmann. “The role of education quality for economic growth.” World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 4122 (2007). Available online,
11. Does money buy strong performance in PISA? – OECD. Available online,
12. Hanushek, E.A. and Woessmann, L. (2012) – Do better school lead to more growth? Cognitive skills, economic outcomes, and causation. In Journal of Economic Growth, 17, 267–321. The paper is available on Eric Hanushek’s website and at the journal’s site.
13. Daniel Koretz (2008) – Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us, Harvard University Press.

Our articles and data visualizations rely on work from many different people and organizations. When citing this topic page, please also cite the underlying data sources. This topic page can be cited as: Max Roser, Mohamed Nagdy and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina (2013) – “Quality of Education”.
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