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 | | | Schools Alone Cannot Close Achievement Gap
A multifaceted strategy can complement school reform by addressing the many out-of-school factors that affect academic performance.
Read the article by Alexandra S. Beatty, staff member of the Testing and Assessment, in the Spring Issue of Issues in Science and Technology
| Education for Life and Work | On February 11th, the Partnership for 21st Century Skills held a Capitol Hill briefing on the NRC Report Education for Life and Work: Developing Transferable Knowledge and Skills in the 21st Century. Study Director Margaret Hilton presented the main messages of the report and responded to questions from a full meeting room of Congressional staff, state educational policy leaders and others.
► Read more ► Read the Education Week report on the briefing by John Wilson, the former President of the American Federation of Teachers
| | Do High-Stakes Tests Improve Learning? |
| Stuart Elliott, director of the Board on Testing and Assessment, and Sara Frueh, communications officer, wrote an article focused on the policy message in the BOTA report, Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Education. The report concludes that test-based incentive programs studied to date do not provide a reliable means of significantly increasing student achievement and offers suggestions about alternate ways that incentive systems might be designed and implemented to obtain better results. ► Read the article |
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 | Education for Life and Work:
Developing Transferable Knowledge and Skills in the 21st Century |  Business and political leaders are increasingly asking schools to integrate development of skills such as problem solving, critical thinking, and collaboration into the teaching and learning of academic subjects. The new report Education for Life and Work: Developing Transferable Knowledge and Skills in the 21st Century clarifies the meaning of the terms "21st century skills" and "deeper learning", examines evidence on links between these skills and positive adult outcomes, outlines teaching methods that support the development of transferable knowledge and skills, assess the degree to which current standards documents support deeper learning, and recommends future steps for policy and research. ► Read more ► Report Brief
| Monitoring Progress Toward Successful STEM Education |  Monitoring Progress Toward Successful K-12 STEM Education: A Nation Advancing? identifies 14 indicators linked to the recommendations from the 2011 NRC report Successful K-12 STEM Education. By providing a focused set of key indicators related to students’ access to quality learning, teaching, and policy and funding initiatives in STEM, the report identifies the data needed to monitor progress in K–12 STEM education and to make informed decisions about improving it.
► Report Brief ► Read More | |
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