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https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/12/17/chinas-education-system-produces-stellar-test-scores-so-why-do-students-head-abroad-each-year-study/
Education scholars have already critiqued PISA as a valid global measure of education quality — but analysts also are skeptical about the selective participation of Chinese students from wealthier schools.
Second, Chinese students, on average, study 55 hours a week — also No. 1 among PISA-participating countries. This was about 20 hours more than students in Finland, the country that PISA declared to have the highest learning efficiency, or reading-test-score points per hour spent studying.
But PISA analysis also revealed that Chinese students are among the least satisfied with their lives.
Students look overseas for a more well-rounded education
Their top destination of choice, by far, is the United States. The 1.1 million or so foreign students in the United States in 2018 included 369,500 Chinese college students
hostility in U.S.-China relations could dampen the appeal of a U.S. education. Britain, in fact, recorded a 30 percent surge in Chinese applicants in 2019, challenging the U.S. global dominance in higher education.
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https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2019/12/03/us-students-gain-ground-against-global-peers.html
Immigrant students, who made up 23 percent of all U.S. students taking PISA, performed significantly better compared to their native-born peers in the United States than they did on average throughout the OECD countries.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/finance/news/pisa-rankings-2019-four-chinese-regions-top-international-student-survey/ar-BBXGCZU
The survey found that 15-year-old students from Beijing, Shanghai, and the eastern provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang ranked top for all three core subjects, achieving the highest level 4 rating.
Students from the United States were ranked level 3 for reading and science, and level 2 for math, while teens from Britain scored a level 3 ranking in all three categories.
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Looking for Post-PISA Answers? Here’s What Our Obsession With Test Scores Overlooks
https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-12-03-looking-for-post-pisa-answers-here-s-what-our-obsession-with-test-scores-overlooks
Andreas Schelicher, director of education and skills at the OECD—the Paris-based organization behind PISA wrote that “students who disagreed or strongly disagreed with the statement ‘Your intelligence is something about you that you can’t change very much’ scored 32 points higher in reading than students who agreed or strongly agreed.”
Those results are similar to recent findings published by Carol Dweck, a Stanford education professor who is often credited with making growth mindset a mainstream concept.
“Growth mindset is a very important thing that makes us active learners, and makes us invest in our personal education,” Schleicher states. “If learning isn’t based on effort and intelligence is predetermined, why would anyone bother?”
It’s “absolutely fascinating” to see the relationship between teachers’ enthusiasm, students’ social-emotional wellbeing and their learning outcomes, Schleicher notes. As one example, he noted in his summary report that “in most countries and economies, students scored higher in reading when they perceived their teachers as more enthusiastic, especially when they said their teachers were interested in the subject.”
In other words, happy teachers lead to better results. That’s hardly a surprising revelation, says Scheleicher. But professional development support is one thing that can sometimes be overlooked by policymakers when so much of the focus is on test scores.
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https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/
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more on Estonia in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=estonia
Hacking, Innovating and Failing Well—How Tech Sector Principles Can Revolutionize Education Workplaces
https://www.edsurge.com/news/2016-04-18-hacking-innovating-and-failing-well-how-tech-sector-principles-can-revolutionize-education-workplaces
In recent years, school reformers, philanthropists, and venture capital investors have placed big bets on blended learning, and edtech professionals have responded with vigor. But as education historian Larry Cuban has noted, the innovative instruction envisioned by edtech advocates remains the exception to the rule—in large part because of the lack of time for teachers to “learn, experiment, and overhaul their practices in collaboration with each other.”
Operating within archaic organizational structures, very few of our nation’s teachers have opportunities to incubate and execute ideas prompted by their deep knowledge of students, families, and communities. This includes ideas about how best to integrate technology.
Google’s 9 principles of innovation for every organization, to which many attribute the company’s dominance in the market.
1. Innovation should come from everywhere
recent Harvard Business Review post enjoined, hackathons are not just for coders. At the Center for Teaching Quality (CTQ), our TeacherSolutions model, like the one we used with Brevard Countyeducators, stokes creativity and prototypes promising ideas quickly.
2. 20% Time
3. Fail Well
European university researchers Oliver Baumann and Nils Stieglitz suggest that “to get more breakthroughs, the best approach is to focus on increasing the variety of ideas that are generated.” They note that some companies are experimenting with rewarding “brilliant failures that provide some sort of insights, even if they turn out not to work.”
The attitude in most schools couldn’t be more different. As education policy expert Linda Darling-Hammond has noted, our nation’s “test-and-punish approach” to accountability has tamped down much-needed innovation.
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more on leadership and technology in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=leadership+technology
Eyal, L. (2012). Digital Assessment Literacy — the Core Role of the Teacher in a Digital Environment. Journal Of Educational Technology & Society, 15(2), 37-49.
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Common to all is a view of the level of literacy as a measure of the quality of human capital of a society or a particular area. Literacy develops in interaction with the environment (Vygotsky, 1987).
digital assessment literacy refers to the role of the teacher as an assessor in a technology-rich environment.
Learning Management Systems (LMS) benefits and limitations
Measurement allows quantitative description of a particular characterization of an individual, expressed in numbers.
the combination of assessment and measurement provides a thorough and accurate picture, based upon which practical conclusions can be drawn (Wagner, 1997). A test is a systematic process in which an aspect of student behavior is quantitatively evaluated (Suen & Parkes, 2002).
For several decades this system of assessment has been criticized for a variety of reasons, including the separation between the teaching-learning process and the evaluation process, the relatively low level of thinking required, and the quantitative reporting of results, which does not contribute to students’ progress. In the last decade, the central argument against the tests system is that their predictability is limited to the field and context in which the students are tested, and that they do not predict student problem solving ability, teamwork, good work habits and honesty.
teachers mistakenly believe that repeating lessons will improve students’ achievements.
To evaluate how well the goals were achieved, objective measurement methods are employed (Black, et al., 2004).
Eshet- Alkalai (2004) offered a detailed conceptual framework for the term ‘digital literacy’ that includes: photo-visual thinking; reproduction thinking; branching thinking; information thinking; and socio-emotional thinking.
Eshet-Alkalai, Y. (2004). Digital literacy: A conceptual framework for survival skills in the digital era. Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia, 13(1), 93–106.
Eshet-Alkalai, Y., & Chajut, E. (2009). Changes Over Time in Digital Literacy. Cyberpsychology & Behavior, 12(6), 713-715. doi:10.1089/cpb.2008.0264
two major patterns of change over time: (a) closing the gap between younger and older participants in the tasks that emphasize profi- ciency and technical control and (b) widening the gap between younger and older participants in tasks that emphasize creativity and critical thinking. Based on the comparison with the matched control groups, we suggest that experience with technology, and not age, accounts for the observed lifelong changes in digital literacy skills
Eshet-Alkalai, Y., & Soffer, O. (2012). Guest Editorial – Navigating in the Digital Era: Digital Literacy: Socio-Cultural and Educational Aspects. Journal Of Educational Technology & Society, 15(2), 1.
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a wide range of technological, cognitive and social competences—collectively termed “Digital Literacy.” Users thus must become “digitally literate” in order to cope effectively with the complex sociological, cognitive and pedagogical challenges these technologies pose. These skills include, for example, the ability to operate computers and navigate the net effectively, to cope with large volumes of information, to evaluate the reliability of information, and to critically assess what seem to be natural (and not ideologically biased) technological tools. In a different way from the spirit of modern print, learners construct and consume knowledge in non-linear environments. They need to learn, collaborate and solve problems effectively in virtual (non face-to-face) learning environments, and to communicate effectively in technology-mediated social participation environments.
It is important to note: digital literacy, then, is not limited simply to computer and Internet operation and orientation. It also relates to a variety of epistemological and ethical issues arise due to the unique characteristics of digital technologies and that are often overlapped with trends related to the post-modern and post-structural era. These include questions regarding the authority of knowledge, intellectual property and ownership, copyright, authenticity and plagiarism. Furthermore, issues such as self-representation, virtual group dynamics, and on-line addiction also arise.
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more on digital literacy in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=digital+assessment+literacy