Group items tagged

New employees too infrequently "possess habits of discipline, ready obedience, self-help, and pride in good work for its own sake". Thus a 1906 Board of Education report. So "for as long as we have evidence, employers have been critical of the ability of the education system to provide the workers they need." Concluding para: ".... the world's most efficient and effective education systems, from Finland to Singapore, have some strikingly common characteristics: they are unremitting in their focus on the core skills of literacy and numeracy, but they set those skills in the wider context of developing higher-order complex thinking. Most of all, they take equality seriously: they focus, in a way which education systems historically did not, on ensuring that all - not just a privileged few - develop the higher-order skills needed to use and analyse information, and that they have access to rewarding higher-level training. Put at its crudest, conventional subjects still matter, but they need to be taught and learnt in innovative ways."

Results from the Adult Literacy and Life Skills Survey conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics have been used to suggest there is a crisis in the literacy and numeracy skills of Australian adults. This study challenges this current view by looking at the issue from a worker's perspective. Production workers, together with their managers and trainers, from three manufacturing companies were interviewed and observed. Little evidence of a direct link between increasing literacy and numeracy skills of workers and improved productivity was found.

Thoughtful piece by Keith Devlin, who is no naysayer, having put a lot of effort into making and running MOOCs. Key excerpt: "Teaching and learning are complex processes that require considerable expertise to understand well. In particular, education has a significant feature unfamiliar to most legislators and business leaders (as well as some prominent business-leaders-turned-philanthropists), who tend to view it as a process that takes a raw material -- incoming students -- and produces graduates who emerge at the other end with knowledge and skills that society finds of value. (Those outcomes need not be employment skills -- their value is to society, and that can manifest in many different ways.) But the production-line analogy has a major limitation. If a manufacturer finds the raw materials are inferior, she or he looks for other suppliers (or else uses the threat thereof to force the suppliers to up their game). But in education, you have to work with the supply you get -- and still produce a quality output. Indeed, that is the whole point of education."

An depth analysis of the OECD skills report by the Independent's Richard Garner.

Based on 2010-2011 data, this BIS study (which I've not read) shows that it is not uncommon for adults who have already got, say, Maths GCSE (or equivalent) at Grade C or above to enrol on a numeracy course at a lower level. This probably strengthens our hunch that there are more people "out there" who might gain from CM than would be assumed from the proportion of adults who have already got a Level 2 Maths qualification.

Lots of data here about the UK's comparative numeracy and literacy performance in this just-released OECD report.