Argomenti: Valutazione degli apprendimenti

What is important for citizens to know and be able to do?” The OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) seeks to answer that question through the most comprehensive and rigorous international assessment of student knowledge and skills. As more countries join its ranks, PISA is evolving to successfully cater for a larger and more diverse group of participants. The OECD launched the PISA for Development initiative in 2014 to support evidence-based policy making globally and offer universal tools in monitoring progress towards the Education Sustainable Development Goal. Spanning six years, this unique pilot project aims to make the assessment more accessible and relevant to a wider range of countries, while maintaining the overall PISA framework and accordance with PISA’s technical standards and usual practices.The PISA for Development Assessment and Analytical Framework presents the conceptual foundations of the project, and covers reading, mathematics and science. PISA for Development has a school-based component and an out-of-school one. For the school-based component, a questionnaire about students’ background is distributed to all participating students. School principals complete a school questionnaire that describes the school, its students and teachers, and the learning environment. Teachers also complete a questionnaire about themselves, the school’s resources, their teaching practice and their students. The out-of-school respondents complete a background questionnaire, and their parent (or person most knowledgeable about them) answers a questionnaire about the youth’s background and childhood experiences. A household observation questionnaire is completed by the interviewer, and information about the location of the household is collected by PISA for Development National Centres.Nine countries participated in the PISA for Development assessment: Bhutan, Cambodia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, Paraguay, Senegal and Zambia.

Did you know that close to half of today’s jobs in the United States could be done by robots and that proportion is rapidly increasing? It is quite possible that about half of today’s high school graduates will not have the knowledge or skills needed to get a decent job when they graduate. Tomorrow’s high school graduates will be able to thrive in this environment, but only if school superintendents, central office executives, and principals use the strategies employed by the world’s top-performing education systems to build the high-performance education systems today’s students will need to succeed tomorrow.

In a world where the kind of things that are easy to teach and test have also become easy to digitise and automate, it will be our imagination, our awareness and our sense of responsibility that will enable us to harness the opportunities of the 21st century to shape the world for the better. Tomorrow’s schools will need to help students think for themselves and join others, with empathy, in work and citizenship. They will need to help students develop a strong sense of right and wrong, and sensitivity to the claims that others make. What will it take for schools to be able to do this? Andreas Schleicher, initiator of the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and an international authority on education policy, has accompanied education leaders in over 70 countries in their efforts to design and implement forward-looking policies and practices. While improvement in education is far easier to proclaim than achieve, in this book Schleicher examines the many successes from which we can learn. This does not mean copying and pasting solutions from other schools or countries, but rather looking seriously and dispassionately at good practice in our own countries and elsewhere to understand what works in which contexts.

A oltre sessanta anni dalla sua pubblicazione, Misurazione e valutazione nel processo educativo (1955) di Aldo Visalberghi rappresenta ancora un utile punto di riferimento per leggere criticamente gli approcci emergenti nella valutazione di apprendimenti, scuole e università. Di fronte all’affermarsi di una “cultura della valutazione” che sembra negare il “senso della misura” invocato da Aldo Visalberghi, i richiami alla necessità di un rapporto dialettico tra valutazione e misurazione e a un’oggettività “relativa e critica” conservano intatto il loro valore.
Questo lavoro restituisce una prima raccolta di contributi degli esperti che, il 18 e 19 gennaio 2016, hanno partecipato al Convegno “Misurazione e Valutazione di scuole e università. Inattualità di Aldo Visalberghi”, organizzato presso il Dipartimento di Scienze della Formazione dell’Università di Catania. Le relazioni si concentrano sulla rilevanza del testo del 1955 in riferimento a due dinamiche ben presenti, oggi, nel nostro sistema educativo: quella relativa alla rilevazione degli apprendimenti e quella legata alla valutazione di scuole e università.