PIACC
- Published on Friday, 21 January 2011 09:33
PIACC is a response to greater interest in the abilities of adults. It is generally accepted that knowledge and ability rather than level of formal education are necessary for economic development. For this reason, methods are sought to improve the quality of education and training. In the last few years there have been great leaps forward in the discovery of methods to measure ability.
The innovation integral in the PIACC study is the testing of ability rather than the level of formal education. Ability and experience are far more important than diplomas gained many years earlier. Thanks to the results of PIAAC we will gain insights into the real effectiveness of the education systems of the world. The goal of the study is to reach conclusions about the average level of ability and its variation in every country and not to measure the ability of isolated individuals chosen at random for study.
.Programme for International Student Assessment – PISA
- Published on Friday, 21 January 2011 09:33
PISA is co-ordinated by the OECD.
In the study, 15-year old pupils are tested on their abilities to read (comprehension and text analysis), mathematics and science. The study started in 2000 and has been carried out in three-year cycles. The methodology allows comparison within each subject area in time. In each cycle, a particular ability is chosen as the main focus. In 2000 this was reading, in 2003 mathematics and in 2006 it was science. The results for reading obtained in 2009 will provide a deeper understanding of changes that have occurred between 2000 and 2009.
The PISA study is run under the same conditions in each country, i.e. using the same questionnaires and instruments to measure ability. The study is able to discriminate defined measured abilities. The basis of the construction of the instruments is not the school curriculum (as in TIMSS). The tests are constructed on the basis of what international experts agree that each student leaving general education should know, be able and work out to do, in order to function in the modern world.
.Civic Education Study – CivEd
- Published on Friday, 21 January 2011 09:31
CivEd is a project coordinated by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA). Fifty-one countries took an interest in the study, of which twenty-eight resolved to take part. Prof. dr hab. Krzysztof Koseła of the Warsaw University Institute of Sociology coordinated the study in Poland.
The goal of CivEd was to describe the level of knowledge and attitudes of citizenship. The project was divided into two stages. The goal of the first stage (1996-1998) was to gather information on the teaching of citizenship and the information necessary to construct instruments to measure pupils’ knowledge of and attitudes to citizenship. In the second phase (1999) 14-year olds were studied using a questionnaire and a test. In 2000 an additional study of knowledge of economics was carried out on 17-year students in Poland and in some other countries.
.The European Survey on Language Competences
- Published on Saturday, 26 June 2010 10:36
The European Survey on Language Competences (ESLC) is carried out at the initiative of the European Commission, and it is aimed at providing data concerning linguistic competences of young people, comparable at the international level, and information on the effectiveness of the current methods and forms of education in each country participating in the survey.
The survey was designed by the international SurveyLang consortium, consisting of renowned institutions specialising in language skills testing, translation studies, psychometric analysis and questionnaire surveys, such as the University of Cambridge ESOL Examinations, Centre international d’études pédagogiques (CIEP), Gallup Europe, Goethe Institut, el Instituto Cervantes, the National Institute for Educational Measurement (Cito), el Universidad de Salamanca, la Universita per Stranieri di Perugia; the Centre for Assessment and Language Certification (CVCl).
As part of the ESLC survey, a randomly-selected sample of students of the final grade of junior high school will take tests in the two most frequently-taught foreign languages – in the case of Poland, it will be English and German. The survey will test three skills, i.e. listening comprehension, reading comprehension and writing. Questionnaires are designed for students, teachers of foreign languages and head teachers, respectively, concerning the social, economic and school system-related factors influencing the level and method of foreign languages teaching in the surveyed group. At the discretion of the school, the survey can be carried out in electronic or traditional paper-and-pencil examination format.
The main survey will take place in 2011. It will cover over 140 junior high schools, and 3000 students, in the whole country. A pilot survey was conducted in March 2010, to verify the quality of research tools and procedures. A total of 50 schools from the Pomorskie and Dolnośląskie Voivodeships participated in this survey.
The survey in question is anonymous. The results will only be presented in the form of collective statistical compilations. The final survey report will be published in mid-2012.
The ESCL in Poland is carried out by the Institute for Educational Research in Warsaw in cooperation with the Ministry of National Education. More information on the survey is available at www.surveylang.org (in English).
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