January 2009 > Faculty > Grants

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Wilson to Lead International Education Assessment Team

Three leading technology companies — Cisco, Intel and Microsoft — unveiled plans Jan. 13 to support work designed to modernize ways to assess learning skills worldwide. As part of the initiative, GSE Professor Mark Wilson will spearhead a working group to identify methodological problems and specify solutions for development of assessments of 21st century skills.

A white paper drafted with the project says that current assessment tools are badly in need of an overhaul and therefore stymieing efforts at education reform.

"Many previous, well-meaning and well-resourced attempts to reform education have stumbled through an inability to demonstrate improvement on standardized tests designed for last century's education," the paper states. "More often than not, such efforts have assessed what was easiest to measure rather than what was most important to measure."

The three-year project will be led by Barry McGaw, director of the Melbourne Research Institute at the University of Melbourne (where Wilson received three degrees). McGaw will oversee the initiative’s five working groups, one of which will be led by Wilson.

Several major international assessment organizations, including the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development and the International Association of the Evaluation of Educational Achievement, have endorsed the project and said they would refer to the findings to inform the development of the next versions of Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) and Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), their respective international
benchmarks.

The three companies previously collaborated on a separate effort to develop guidelines for the use of information and communication technologies in teaching.

For more information and access to the white paper (“A Call to Action”) and policy brief, click here.

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