Measuring Educational Innovation across Nations: What Has Changed over the Past Decade

This February, the OECD Headquarters in Paris welcomed a premier cohort of educational experts from the EU, the USA, Australia, Argentina, Chile, Russia, etc. for a global forum to discuss findings from OECD’s large-scale project that analyzes how the landscapes of educational innovations have been evolving across 40 countries during the past 10 years. Anastasia Andreeva, Research Assistant at the IOE Center for the Study of Educational Innovations, has contributed her important stake while drafting the Project’s whitepaper. Head of the Center, Dr. Diana Koroleva has also joined the Project session in Paris to share her expert thinking on how the focus and scope of this study could be framed and scaled up going forward.     

Drawing upon evidence from the world’s most comprehensive educational assessments, such as PISA, TIMSS, PIRLS, etc., the OECD whitepaper Innovation in Education: What Has Changed in the Classroom in the Past Decade? aims to provide country-case insights about areas where innovative processes have been able to generate sizeable practical yields and have been conducive to ‘breakthrough advances’ in the educational realm. “While plenty of studies have been carried out that seek to gauge the effectiveness and impact of various novelties that are piloted in the classroom, it is often unclear whether and to what extent these innovations are able to survive into sustainable school practices that can foster the quality of learning outcomes,” Deborah Roseveare, Head of the OECD Innovation and Measuring Progress Division noted when talking about what essentially makes up the Project rationale.         

According to Diana Koroleva, the OECD Project can provide sound groundwork for a broader and more meaningful discussion on trends and innovative vectors in global education as the study renders a holistic portrayal of what has been happening in the leading nations. For all that, Dr. Koroleva notes, as the Project moves further there is a clear reason for special emphasis to be accorder to topics of how the flourishing domain of non-formal schooling has been performing, alongside such areas as factors of bottom-up innovations as viewed from a cross-national perspective, etc.