1. Formative Assessment: the CERI context
Tom Schuller
Paris, January 2005

2. Directorate For Financial Directorate for Fiscal and Trade Employment
Enterprise Affairs
Directorate for
Employment
Labour and
Social Affairs
Trade
Directorate
Economics
Department
Directorate
for Education
COUNCIL
Directorate for
Public Management
and Territorial
Development
SECRETARIAT
Centre
for Educational
Research
and Innovation
(CERI)
COMMITTEES
Statistics
Directorate
Directorate for
Food Agriculture
and Fisheries
Environment
Directorate
Directorate
for Science
Technology
and Industry
Development
Co-operation
Directorate

3. Directorate for Education
Education and Training Policy Division
Indicators and Analysis Division
Directorate for Education
Centre for Education Research and Innovation
IMHE/PEB

4. CERI’s goals:
To enrich international knowledge and understanding of trends and issues in lifelong learning, ie across all sectors and modes
To encourage better links between research, policy innovation and practice.

5. We do this by:
Promoting research and policy debate through publications, electronic discussion and conferences.
Carrying out studies of key educational issues, using a combination of our own staff and outside experts from around the world.
Developing tools, indicators and frameworks for international analyses of education systems and practices.

6. Our programme:
Lifelong learning provides the overarching context. Within that our key themes are:
Innovation and knowledge management.
Human and social capital.
A futures focus.
Learning and teaching.

7. OECD/CERI contextual factors
Growing preoccupation with outcomes, as well as inputs and participation rates; outcomes are more than qualifications achieved.
The returns to education cannot be understood in terms of individual performance alone
CERI interest in ‘evidence’; and in causal mechanisms.
Data availability and appropriate measurement: the need for mixed methodologies

8. EDU/CERI: related projects
PISA
Teachers
Schooling for Tomorrow/University Futures: what works in futures thinking
Learning Science – the brain project: effective learning at different points in the lifecourse
Evidence-based Policy Research: matching methods to issues

9. Key issues
Asking the right questions: relevant, significant and (partly) answerable
Maintaining trust: valuing experience, but combined with accountability
Accumulating evidence – including on evidence…

10. Conference goals
Share, examine and extend the findings of the CERI study
Critique/confirm the model and the evidence
Scaling up: how to implement FA on wider basis
Link to next WW study, on adult basic skills

11. “It is hardly possible to over-rate the value …
“It is hardly possible to over-rate the value ….of placing human beings in contact with persons dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar…Such communication has always been, and is peculiarly in the present age, one of the primary sources of progress.”
JS Mill, Principles of Political Economy