An interview with Dylan Wiliam, Emeritus Professor of Educational Assessment at the Institute of Education, University of London, on his paper entitled Optimizing Talent: Closing Educational and Social Mobility Gap Worldwide, published last year at the Salzburg Global Seminar in Austria.

Marc Tucker:  In your paper, you start out making an argument that today’s children are more intelligent than their parents and their grandparents and you combine that with an argument that the quality of teaching in government-funded schools appears to be higher than that in private schools in most wealthy countries.  Can you tell us more about the research on both points?

Dylan Wiliam:  The first argument draws on the work of psychologist James Flynn (the Flynn effect), an American living and working in New Zealand.  He found that IQ tests need to be re-benchmarked every decade, because IQs are rising, about 3 to 4 points every ten years.  So IQ norms are rising, and people are getting smarter in ways we may not entirely realize.  The average would be around 110 or 115 if we didn’t adjust it.  It has risen 15 points since World War II.  This is occurring on some tests more than others; arithmetic scores have gone up very little while spatial scores and problem-solving scores are increasing substantially.  Maybe young people aren’t using their intelligence today as well as they could be but there is evidence that they are smarter.

Tucker:  Most American teachers think about intelligence in the way they were taught to – it is a function of the genes.  Is the gene pool changing, or do we have a different idea now about what these tests are measuring?

Wiliam:  Research in genetics shows that the nature vs. nurture debate is essentially an irrelevant question.  Interestingly, what you find in that debate is the estimate depends on the variation in environment.  It is an unstable question unless you can calibrate the differences in environment, which no one can do.  Secondly it is a question of epigenetics—the study of changes in gene activity that do not involve alterations to the genetic code but still get passed down to at least one successive generation.  What we are seeing is that certain genes get switched on or switched off depending on the experience we have.  For example, there is one gene that if you have two long forms, nothing happens but if you have two short forms the likelihood of getting depression increases in an abusive environment but the likelihood decreases in a healthy environment.  So what we understand now is that the nature vs. nurture debate is completely irrelevant because different environments switch on or switch off different genes.

The plasticity of IQ is much greater than was previous imagined.  There were some experiments with orphans from Romania and they had extraordinary cognitive deficits when they were in the orphanages, but rich environments helped them to catch up very quickly.  Supportive environments really do help make-up for a lot early on.

Environments vary quite a lot.  Many people are familiar with the Hart and Risley study, Meaningful Differences: An average three-year old from a professional-class family would have accumulated experience with almost 45 million words while an average three-year old from a welfare family would have accumulated experience with about 13 million words, resulting in a 30 million word gap.  A child from a working class house that is in the top ten percent of cognitive development will be overtaken by a child from a middle class house that is in the bottom ten percent of cognitive development by age six. So there are extraordinary differences in the environment that make any kind of speculation about genetics questionable.

I have a goal that we should magnify the impact of genetic effects on IQ because if we give all students a rich environment, then the only difference would be in genetics.  The important thing is that high quality environments do seem to make a big difference.  There are debates about things like Head Start—IQs go up while in the program and decline when they leave that environment, but if they learn to read while in the program, those skills are there for life.

There is the argument that what you do with the talents you have is more important than the actual talents you have.  Teaching kids about delayed gratification, persistence, how to apply themselves— these things are important and we are finding they can be learned.  My conclusion is that there is almost certainly a genetic component to IQ, but we can’t change it so we shouldn’t worry about it and it’s probably not that important.

Tucker:  Your second proposition is that when you take everything as equal, public schools do better than private. Can you explain that in more detail?

Wiliam:  The 2006 OECD data shows that in most countries, kids in private schools outperformed kids in state schools.  In some countries, the gaps are quite large.  But the most extraordinary thing was they had a lot of background about the educational background of the students and have complied an index of socioeconomic deprivation.  When you control for the socioeconomic status of the student and the schools, there is not a single country in PISA where kids in private schools outperform kids in public schools because you are removing group effects.  The effects of the private schools outcomes are peer effects.  So if you’re a parent and can afford to send your kid to a private school you probably should because the teacher may not be good but the peer group is.

Once you control for these things, school effects are small.  By the time kids are 8-years old, one year’s progress is about .4 of a standard deviation.  So the average achievement made by one student in a cohort is very small compared to the overall spread of achievement in a cohort.  The range of achievement within a cohort is ten times the average progress made by a cohort a year.

The consequence is that the differences between students are typically much larger than people imagine, and it’s hardly surprising that any differences in school effects gets swamped by this.  And the second thing is that teacher quality is one of the most important variables in the system, and if teachers are randomly distributed through the system, it diminishes school effects.  For all these reasons, school effects are quite small.  That explains why reform efforts based on changing the kinds of schools available to students are ineffective, because even if the schools are good, they are not making that much of an effect.  That is because teacher quality appears to be randomly distributed across the system.

Tucker:  In the United States, where teachers have more choice about where they teach than in other countries, what you see is teachers with more seniority and experience choosing the higher status and easier positions within a school, and teachers with better reputations preferring to teach in a school with more advantaged students.  So you would expect to see better teachers teaching in schools with more advantaged students – a systematic bias toward having good teachers in more advantaged schools and bad teachers in less advantaged schools.

Wiliam:  It might be true, but it might also be the other way around.  The fact is, those teachers with seniority may not be any better than the others.  Teachers with seniority may be able to migrate to easier to staff schools, but they aren’t likely to be any better – those decisions are made on things only weakly related to teacher quality, like experience.  So it doesn’t distort the system.

Tucker:  Your logic line begins by saying, in effect, that kids’ intelligence is steadily improving and we have every reason to believe that public schools are at least as good as private ones, so you ask, why are employers so unhappy?  And the answer is because the dynamics of the global economy are changing their requirements.

Wiliam:  People haven’t really understood how rapidly the world of work is changing, because it has happened incrementally.  In the 1980s, being able to type in bold on a word processer would increase a secretary’s salary by 25 percent, now, we expect 7-year olds to be able to do that.  What we see is an extraordinary increase in the types of skills that people are expected to have.  More jobs are being automated, so the number of jobs that can be done without basic literacy and numeracy skills has decreased.

People forget how much more skilled people are today then they were 25 or 30 years ago, let alone 50 years ago.  There is an extraordinary destruction of jobs by automation.  Before you were basically renting your physical strength to the employer.  A factory may still be the world’s largest manufacturer but it employs way less people.  What are left are the jobs that not easily automated or off-shored. There are quite a lot of manual jobs that will never be off-shored—Hairdressing and taxi driving will always be required locally.  Middle jobs such as appraising someone’s eligibility for a mortgage – that used to be a skilled job.  Now, computers can do that more reliably, cheaper and quicker.

Tucker:  I always use the example of sail making, it used to be a skilled job, but now there are algorithms that will calculate every single panel in a sail as well as the measurements of the entire sail and it will tell you the conditions you can use that sail and when it will break. And it will also cut and sew the sail automatically.  As long as the work is routine, it’s automatable.

Wiliam:  Routine cognitive jobs turned out to be easy to automate.  And they are often easier to automate than routine manual jobs because computers are simpler than robots.  Shelf stocking is still done by human beings because they can still do it cheaper than a robot.  In the auto industry, there is a woman who does a job for $25,000 a year, whereas a robot arm can do the job for $100,000 a year.  As soon as the robot arm is cheaper than the worker, she will no longer have a job.  This is the race between education and technology, as described by Claudia Goldin from Harvard.  The world of work is destroying jobs faster than we can up-skill.  We have been walking up the down escalator in the past and have been able to make progress but now the escalator is speeding up and we may fall behind.  We need to walk faster and improve our schools faster in order to progress.

America is wealthy enough to give everyone in the country a very high standard of living by redistributing the current wealth.  This will not happen.  If you are a teacher in school today you should be preparing your student for a world where the redistribution doesn’t take place as well as if it did take place—in other words, we have to prepare them for the world we will think will unfold as well as the one we hope will unfold.

Tucker:  At the end of your essay, you make the point that the job of schools used to be to identify talent and let it move to the top.  Now, schools have to be talent incubators or talent factories – we can’t just identify it, we have to create it.  What does that mean in terms of what schools look like?  How do educators have to redefine the task?  What does this change look like?

Wiliam: The talent refinery model held that some kids can learn, and others can’t, and you have to figure out the ones that you should invest time in.  In contrast, the talent factory model holds that every kid has to achieve at a high level.  And many people say that that’s an impossible goal.  I think more good things will happen if we assume that’s achievable than if we assume it isn’t achievable.  I’m not saying there aren’t differences between students – there are huge differences.  So we need a school that is designed to minimize the impact of those differences, rather than to maximize them.  Giving them more time, bringing them in for weekend tutoring – the idea that the school will do whatever it takes to make sure that every child has a reasonable shot at getting reasonable proficiency in the desired subjects.  In high school, we have that model already in athletics.  A high school football coach doesn’t just cancel the season if they only have six good players; they take the students they have and make them the best football players they can be.  We need to translate that into the academic equivalent.

Sharon Lynn Kagan

An interview with Sharon Lynn Kagan, Virginia and Leonard Marx Professor of Early Childhood and Family Policy, Co-Director of the National Center for Children and Families and, Associate Dean for Policy at Teachers College, Columbia University and Professor Adjunct at Yale University’s Child Study Center.

Marc Tucker:  Over the years, you’ve travelled all over the world, consulting with governments on early childhood education issues.  Have you seen an increased interest in developed and developing countries in early childhood education recently, and, if so, what do you think has spurred this interest?

Sharon Lynn Kagan:  Unequivocally I have seen growing interest in early childhood education.  Countries all around the globe have been motivated by the results of the neuroscience research showing how the course of development of children’s brains in the early years has irrevocable effects in school and later in life, by the research showing how much money is saved in the long run by governments that invest in early childhood education and by the evaluation research that shows strong academic gains for children who have had early childhood education as compared to those who don’t.  Countries, in other words, are much more aware than they used to be that early childhood education is a social investment that has unusually strong returns.

One of the most interesting things I have observed lately is the growing instances of western countries sending emissaries from business and industry to other countries to speak about the benefits of investing in early childhood education at forums sponsored by organizations like the World Bank and UNESCO.  Academics and other intellectual leaders are doing much the same thing. It is clear that all these efforts are paying off in greatly increased government interest in early childhood education all over the world.

Tucker:  In the United States, until fairly recently, a substantial fraction of adult women were full-time homemakers.  However, as the economy tightened up and more women began to enter the workforce to bring in a second income, that meant that the person who would traditionally provide full-time childcare at home could no longer do so.  This shift appears to be occurring in Asia now.  Do you think this could also be another reason for the rise in government-provided early childhood education?

Kagan:  I do think it is true that this is happening in many countries, but I do not think it is as strong a motivator as the data on the effects of early childhood education.  The most potent motivator has been the neuroscience research, which has revealed that a large proportion of brain development occurs by the age of five.  Social and economic shifts are certainly a factor in the expansion of early childhood education worldwide, but less so than the research.

Tucker:  As countries are beginning to focus on developing early childhood education systems, what shape are these systems taking?

Kagan:  Early childhood education systems are contingent on several different variables.  First, the amount of money a country wants to invest.  Second, the capacity for development and the infrastructure a country has in place.  In some countries, there are limited teacher training facilities and limited regulatory bodies.  These countries are often more interested, therefore, in developing community-based and informal programs.  In countries where there is already an infrastructure in place, they are more likely to move toward formal, center-based programs. The nature of the investments made are based on the context in that country.

Tucker:  Talk, if you will, about the process that governments go through in formulating policy on early childhood education.  Can you characterize these stages?

Kagan:  It is an iterative process.  It begins with governmental awareness of the importance of early childhood education, and the importance of making these investments.  The second step is understanding what already exists in both the formal and informal markets in any given country, since early childhood education frequently takes place in informal markets.  The third step is developing a broad-based, long-term plan.  Often, external experts are called in to help with this step, particularly in countries without a lot of infrastructure already in place.  You’re right in thinking that this all happens incrementally.  Once there is a plan, countries begin to bite off pieces of it that make sense in that context.  The pieces are different depending on the country.  Some begin with infrastructure development, some begin with teacher training, or data and monitoring systems.  In other countries, they think that process is too slow and immediately go out into villages and communities and begin to establish centers.  After gaining awareness of the importance of early childhood education and developing a plan, the steps vary based on the country.

The one thing that is happening with less frequency than I would like is a serious approach to the evaluation of the impact of these programs.  Because money is short, and countries want to maximize the amount of services they can offer, they tend to invest less than they should in evaluation.

Tucker:  Can you characterize what elements need to be in place if a country is to have a world class early childhood education system?

Kagan:  Patience is the most important.  It will not happen overnight. They need at the outset a set of guidelines or principles that reflect the national heritage and national values and priorities of the country, but at the same time serve to guide early educators toward a clear set of goals.  Second, they need to focus on building a professionally competent workforce.  The third component is equitably dispersed, quality facilities, so there are not uneven service patterns in which some children are well-served and have easy access, and others poorly served with little access.  Lastly, they need to figure out how to provide sustained government support.  I’ve observed that, in all countries where the core elements have been put in place, there is strong public support for the program and governments are able to make a sustained commitment.

Tucker:  What kind of institutional and regulatory structures are required to create this type of system?

Kagan:  The number one requirement is a training capacity so you have people who can do the work well.  The second is very clear standards and expectations for what both teachers and children should know and be able to do.  The third is a routinized monitoring system that allows for chronicling the performance of the programs in a child-sensitive way – a whole accountability apparatus needs to be developed.  The most successful countries also find ways to build in mechanisms for parent and community engagement.  Early childhood education is very much a part of the community, and segregating from other community functions does the families a disservice.

Tucker:  If you were designing an early childhood education system, how would you think about the balance between play and cognitive development?

Kagan:  I feel very strongly about this, because it is a false dichotomy.  Play is the pedagogy; play is the means by which children learn.  All programs need a large amount of time for children to explore through play.  By play, I do not mean letting children mill around aimlessly, but guided play, intentional play, so there is meaning derived from what they perceive as play.  There also needs to be very clear specifications about content.  To that end, I strongly believe that standards are a very clear way of delineating what we want children to know and be able to do.  But this can be centered on a play-based pedagogy.

Tucker:  Speaking of standards, how do you think about the staff quality in early childhood education systems?  Do you think that the people delivering early childhood education should have the same kinds of qualifications as compulsory school teachers?  How should countries set the standards for the people who will staff their early childhood education systems?

Kagan:  I actually think being an early childhood teacher takes more knowledge and energy than being a primary or secondary school teacher.  In addition to content, these teachers need to understand child development and child psychology, and they have to deal with parents, so they really need to be deeply knowledgeable about many domains of development.  I would love to see early childhood teachers globally trained to the level of primary and secondary teachers.  But I also think that the strategies used to train primary and secondary teachers are not necessarily relevant to early childhood teachers.  For early childhood teachers, we need to use interactive technology, reflective practice, and competency-based assessments.  I am really hoping for new, very inventive approaches to teacher professional education and development.  I believe that this learning should be ongoing, and I am a big proponent of peer learning and reflective practice.  I don’t think many professional teacher training programs have those qualities yet.

Tucker:  Do you see significant differences in national approaches to early childhood education in East Asia, Australasia and Europe?

Kagan:  Two decades ago, I would have said yes.  A decade ago, I would have said maybe.  Now, I am seeing much more agreement.  In some countries, under different political regimes than those now in place, there was a tendency to educate young children for performances, and a preference for heavily didactic techniques.  But the changes in Asia, and the countries in the former Soviet Union, as well as increased access to information through the new media, have led to a much more universal acceptance of theories of early childhood pedagogy that support play as an approach to instruction.

Tucker:  The countries that are behind the curve often have fewer high-quality people than they need.  How do countries train people at an affordable cost, on a clear timeline?

Kagan:  This is a universal dilemma that affects high-quality early childhood education around the globe.  I do think the use of interactive technology has to be marshaled more effectively.  We need to embrace technology as a normal part of teacher education.  At the micro level, for example, one of the things a training program could do is film teachers and use the film to help them reflect on their practice.  Using these types of technology can make training more widely accessible.  There are people in the United States who are working on this.  I think we can expect a lot of progress in this arena in the next couple of years.

Tucker:  I would like to share with you a modest analytical framework and ask you if it corresponds to your experience. Imagine three cells.  In the first is Western and Northern Europe, where women have been going into the workforce in large numbers for some time now.  These countries also have a larger-than-average proportion of national resources controlled by the government.  Those countries have been ahead of the curve worldwide with respect to early childhood education provision.  Another cell, East Asia, is at the other end of that dimension line.  In most of those countries, women have been slower to enter the paid workforce than in Europe and North America.  They are also cultures in which a woman’s status is measured more by her children’s success than in Europe and North America, so women spend more time with their children and provide the rough equivalent of what is provided in early childhood education programs in Europe.  And finally, I would characterize the United States and some other western-oriented societies as being somewhere in the middle, but having the strengths of neither.  They have neither the amount of personal support of the mother at home, nor the level of institutional support, so children are at a disadvantage with respect to both.  Do you think this is an accurate characterization of the relative positions of these three parts of the world with respect to early childhood education?

Kagan:  I think that holds a lot of water, but it does not account for third-world countries.  We have women all over the world who are “in the labor force,” but are not earning money, and that’s actually the majority of the world.  But I do think your analysis is right.

Tucker:  The Economist Intelligence Unit recently did a special report on early childhood education, a report in which you played a key role as an advisor.  What, in your view, is the significance of this report from the Economist?

Kagan:  I think the fact that the Economist Intelligence Unit elected to focus on early childhood education in the recent survey, Starting well: Benchmarking early education across the world, is nothing short of a landmark breakthrough.  They do not usually focus on these issues.  They did an excellent job with their analysis, it demonstrates the increased support for these issues, and it will bring this subject to a new audience.

Or do we?  Consider the typical list of  “21st century skills”:  Problem Solving, Creativity, Leadership, Collaboration, Adaptability, Initiative, Critical Thinking, Learning to Learn, Agility, Innovation, Communication, and, of course, Technological Literacy.  What’s interesting about this list is that, except for the last item, Technological Literacy, all of these goals were important to the headmasters and faculty of Harrow, Eton and Rugby—the great British “public” schools at the close of the 19th century and the opening of the 20th.  These schools were responsible for training that era’s “masters of the universe,” the people who would be responsible for running the British Empire.  They needed people who could operate independently, if necessary, who could apply what they had learned to problems no one had anticipated, who could come up with innovative solutions to those problems, who would be good team members, who could lead, who could communicate well, and so on, right through the list.  Back in those days, though, it was clear to everyone involved that much of it would be learned at school but outside the classroom— on the playing fields and by the student as he negotiated the informal, but formidable, social structure of the institution.  Not least important were the values they wanted those institutions to inculcate.  “Its not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game that counts.”  If course, it did matter whether you won or lost, but your standing in society would depend in some measure on how you did it.

What is most important about the skills they were after is that they were reserved for—and, in some respects, actually defined by—the British elite.  They were not for the hoi polloi.  Far less was expected of the ordinary British students and the schools that prepared them.  What is truly remarkable about the typical list of 21st century skills is not their content—it is a very old list—but the fact that the countries that are now leading the PISA league tables expect all their students, not just an elite, to master them, and have more or less completely redesigned their education systems to that end.

But the matter does not rest there.  For some years now, employers in the world’s advanced economies have been complaining that the graduates they get do not measure up to their needs.  Correctly surmising that educators have not understood how dramatically the terms of global business competition have changed the nature of their human resources requirements, they have pursued the not unreasonable idea that they might get a better response if they could only produce a more accurate and detailed list of their requirements.  And thus was born a growing number of efforts to define 21st century skills.

In my mind, these efforts have not so much defined a new set of skills as make explicit the sorts of skills that have always been expected of most elites, but were never codified in this way.  That’s actually very important, because we are here discussing the nature of the demands now being placed, for the first time, on mass education systems.  Countries in the past have always been willing to spend a lot to educate their elites, because they have been so small, and because it has often been the elites themselves that shelled out the money for the education of their own children for this purpose.  This time, it is different.  It is for everyone, it is the public’s money, most of the children who will now have to meet these standards will be harder to educate but there will be no more money than there was before to educate them.  So it is now very important to spell out what society is trying to achieve, and to spell it out in a way that can guide the legions of ordinary teachers who will now be expected to do for ordinary youngsters what only elite teachers were expected to do for elite students before, so that students all over a country will have access to the same opportunities.

But it turns out to be not simply a matter of writing down on paper what the faculty of the English public schools were trying to accomplish.  Elite higher education institutions communicated informally with elite secondary school heads what they were looking for and the heads recommended the graduates who they thought would be most suitable as undergraduates at their elite institutions.  They did not need to spell out the skills nor did they need to have tests that had been proven to be valid and reliable.  Back in those days, there was no organized education research establishment, and there were certainly no cognitive scientists, psychometricians and professional test makers.  So now we have the advantage of science as we go about formulating the skills graduates will need as they enter the workforce and take up their duties as citizens and family members.  And we also have the advantage of a very active business community, as well as private foundations, and government, which have collectively been willing in many cases to fund research intended to produce empirically-derived descriptions of the needed skills.

We’ve been at this awhile.  In 2009, the OECD published a Working Paper on “21st Century Skills and Competencies For New Millennium Learners in OECD Countries.”  The authors, Katerina Ananiadou and Magdalean Claro, gathered together all the definitions of 21st century skills they could find and sent out a survey instrument to the OECD countries asking them whether they were incorporating such skills in their education policies.  Only 16 countries returned the survey form.  Most said that their country’s policies addressed most of the items on the list in some way, usually in the context of an overall revision of their national or state or provincial curriculum.  But virtually all said that they were not measuring the acquisition of most of the mentioned skills in any systematic way, or any way at all, except to the extent that school inspectors chanced to take them into account in the course of their visits.  Apart from skills related to the use of information technology, they reported, schools of education were not training prospective teachers in the development of these skills.  And, though there was mention of these skills in official documents, the terms were not well defined or specific. It seems that not much was happening as the first decade of the new millennium was coming to a close.

But before 2009 was out, the situation changed dramatically.  A consortium formed by three of the world’s leading technology companies—Cisco, Intel and Microsoft—announced that they were partnering with Singapore, Finland, Australia and the United States to create a serious research and development program to identify the 21st century skills with the specificity necessary to produce very high quality web-based assessments of them.  This Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills program (now known by its acronym ATC21S) would be based at the University of Melbourne in Australia and headed by Barry McGaw, formerly the director of the education program at the OECD (McGaw has since retired and the program is now headed by Patrick Griffith).  Costa Rica and the Netherlands have since been added to the ranks of participating countries.  Several other world class universities, in addition to the University of Melbourne, have also been added to the roster of participants, as have several commercial developers.  Leading academics were involved in specifying the 21st century skills to the detail needed to use them to drive a serious research and development program intended to result in high quality curriculum and assessments.  The decision was made by the participants to focus the research and development program on two arenas:  ICT Literacy for Learning and Collaborative Problem Solving.  The first round of piloting those materials is now complete and more is under way.

The reader will note that the choice of these two arenas meant that the research and development would focus not just on what the relevant skills are, and how to teach them and how to assess them, but, in particular, how to teach them and how to assess them using technology.  The participants clearly believe that technology opens up possibilities for enriching teaching and assessment in ways that are not possible without the technology and are out to demonstrate the validity of that belief.  The assessments are performance-based and are designed to model the kind of instruction that will enable students to do well on them.  For a more detailed overview of the ATC21S program, see this video of Patrick Griffith.  To get a feel for the kind of instructional materials being prepared by the project, see this video.  To get access to the papers prepared by leading academics to support the work of the ATC21S consortium, look here.

The ATC21S effort initially involved more than 250 researchers worldwide in the process of defining 21st century skills.  In the end, they organized them into four categories, as follows:

Ways of Thinking: Creativity, critical thinking, problem-solving, decision-making and learning

Ways of Working: Communication and collaboration

Tools for Working: Information and communications technology and information literacy

Skills for Living in the World: Citizenship, life and career and personal and social responsibility

The faculty at Eaton, Harrow and Rugby would have been very much at home with the first, second and fourth of these, and perhaps the second part of the third as well.

The ATC21S acknowledged its debt to a number of other initiatives that preceded it, including the Partnership for 21st Century Skills in the United States, which partnered American firms with American states to develop a list of skills which the partner states then drew on as they developed their academic standards; and the work of the Lisbon Council in the European Union.  And they also acknowledged the work of several groups which had focused more narrowly on defining needed skills in the arena of information technology and communications, including the International Society for Technology in Education and the Educational Testing Service in the United States.

But by far the most interesting contribution to this nascent field in recent times has been a contribution of the National Research Council of the National Academies in the United States, the report of an NRC panel chaired by Jim Pellegrino titled “Education for Life and Work: Developing Transferable Knowledge and Skills in the 21st Century.”  You can download a brief on the report and a PDF of the prepublication version and order a printed final report here.

The report acknowledges right at the outset that “…these dimensions of human competence…have been valuable for many centuries….The important difference across time may lie in society’s desire that all students attain levels of mastery—across multiple areas of skill and knowledge—that were previously unnecessary for individual success in education and the workplace.”  The Committee identified three broad rubrics under which it organized the relevant skills, as follows:

The Cognitive Domain: Of which there are three clusters—cognitive processes and strategies; knowledge; and creativity.  Included here are critical thinking, information literacy, reasoning and argumentation and innovation.

The Intrapersonal Domain: Of which there are again three clusters—intellectual openness; work ethic and conscientiousness; and positive core self-evaluation.   These include competencies like flexibility, initiative, appreciation for diversity and metacognition.

The Interpersonal Domain:  Of which there are two clusters—teamwork and collaboration; and leadership.  Included here are communication, collaboration, responsibility and conflict resolution.

Pellegrino and company acknowledge that there is not very much research showing a causal relationship between these skills and the kinds of adult outcomes that the societies interested in 21st century skills are hoping for, but they point out that the research that is available points in that direction.  And, of course, they gently suggest that more research on this subject would be useful (there are many calls for more research).

The Committee uses the term “deeper learning” to describe what it is mainly after, the ability to take what is learned in one situation and apply it to new situations.  And they call this process “transfer.”  They then go on to say that deeper learning often involves shared learning and interactions with other people.  Deeper learning is used by the individual to develop expertise in a particular domain of knowledge or performance.  The product of deeper learning is transferable knowledge, including the knowledge of how, when and why to apply this knowledge to answer questions and solve problems.  All of this knowledge is structured around fundamental principles of the content area and their relationships, not lists of facts and procedures.  This, it seems to me, is a very important point.  We hang our knowledge on the conceptual structures of the disciplines, and it is in the process of understanding those structures and learning how both to hang new knowledge on them and use them to understand new situations that we come to be able to solve new and complex problems.  This is why rote learning of facts and procedures is not enough, indeed why it is not the heart of the matter.

But the Committee makes it very clear that it is a great mistake to think about the 21st Century Skills as hanging out there by themselves, to be taught as if they were freestanding subjects.  No, no, it says.  They play out differently for different disciplines and the only way to teach them successfully is in the context of the disciplines.

For those who might have thought that the job was nearly done when the 21st Century Skills have been described, the Committee puts that thought to rest.  Standards documents will need to be thoroughly revised to reflect this much broader range of skills subject by subject.  New curricula will have to be written.  Most important, perhaps, the programs of teachers colleges will have to be completely rethought and new approaches to student assessment will have to be developed, because we now have the tools to assess  only a very small part  of what we need to be assessing and, not least, because assessment always drives what teachers do in the classroom, and, in this age of assessment-driven accountability, if the assessments do not skillfully assess what we now want our students to be able to do, we won’t teach it and the students are not likely to be able to do it.

All of which brings me back to where I began.  These are not new skills.  What is new is the determination of a growing number of nations to teach them to all of their students.  Even though these are not new skills, they will not be widely found among a nation’s students unless the education system of that country, taken as whole, is driven by standards, curriculum, assessments and teacher education systems fundamentally different from those that were previously used to drive that country’s mass education system.  Some nations are well down that road.  Others, like my own, are largely at the beginning of it.  The Pellegrino report provides some very useful insights into the research that can be used to do that, the research that still needs to be done, and the scale and nature of the task ahead.  That is a very useful contribution.

2012 2nd International Conference on Economic, Education and Management
June 1-2, 2012, Shanghai, China
ICEEM 2012 is a meta-conference for researchers in the Asia-Pacific region to connect with international research communities for the worldwide dissemination and sharing of ideas for research in the field of economic, education and management. The 2-day conference will foster the building of research communities in the field of computers in education.

Comparative Education Society in Europe, 25th Conference
June 18-21, 2012, Salamanca, Spain
The topic of the Conference, “Empires, Post-coloniality and Interculturality: Comparative Education between Past, Post, and Present”, reflects some of the major scholarly issues in which academics, researchers, policy analysts and students in the field of comparative education are currently concerned and engaged.

Canada International Conference on Education (CICE-2012)
June 18-21, 2012, Toronto, Canada
The CICE is an international refereed conference dedicated to the advancement of the theory and practices in education. The aim of the conference is to provide an opportunity for academicians and professionals from various educational fields with cross-disciplinary interests to bridge the knowledge gap and promote research esteem and the evolution of pedagogy.

PGL12: 2012 Partnership for Global Learning Annual Conference
June 29-30, 2012 New York, New York
The Asia Society Partnership for Global Learning annual conference is dedicated to preparing American students to be globally competent and ready for college. The two-day event connects educators, business leaders, policymakers and resource providers to share best practices, build partnerships and advance policies to ensure the next generation is ready to lead in an interconnected world.

Attaining and Sustaining Mass Higher Education
September 17-19, 2012, Paris, France
This is the biennial general conference of the OECD’s Programme for Institutional Management in Higher Education. The conference will examine issues and challenges such as how to manage access, quality and accountability, funding and financing, institutional diversity, internationalisation, technology and the academic workforce. The goal is to identify longer-term trends and will include analyses of national and institutional policies, case studies and the latest research from the OECD and elsewhere. The Conference will bring together many different perspectives and look at the issues at the international, national, institutional, or sub-institutional level.