How will education reinvent itself to respond to the megatrends that are shaping the future of our societies and educate learners for their future, rather than our past?

The understanding of innovation and ability to measure it is essential to the improvement of education. Monitoring systematically whether, and how, practices are changing within classrooms and educational organisations, how teachers develop professionally and use learning resources, how schools communicate with their communities, and to what extent change and innovation are linked to better educational outcomes would provide a substantial increase in the international education knowledge base. Policy makers would be able to better target interventions and resources, get quick feedback on whether reforms changed educational practices as expected, and we would better understand the conditions for and impact of innovation in education.

Abstract: This chapter gives an overview of why and how we measure innovation in education, relates the methodology used to other existing measures or approaches, and provides a summary of the main findings of the book. It ends by pointing to some possible next steps for strengthening the measurement of innovation in the education sector.

This publication reports the results of secondary analyses of data from several sources collected in surveys of students, teachers and principals. These data are drawn from PISA (Programme on International Student Assessment), TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) and PIRLS (Progress in International Reading Literacy Study). PISA, TIMSS and PIRLS have been created to look at student achievements in maths and science (PISA and TIMSS) and text understanding (PISA and PIRLS). Background questionnaires provide relevant information about classroom or school practices which have been used to identify the extent to which they have changed over time. All these surveys are cross-sectional.

The analyses reported throughout this book have shown considerable variation in the amount of change in educational practices and thus the potential extent of innovation. In order to provide an overview of change across school and classroom practices and to draw some conclusions about the level of innovation in each country, it may be considered helpful to combine some of this information and look at the extent and focus of innovation within education in different countries.

The following tables, available only in electronic format display the underlying data for the figures in Part I, organised by chapters. Data is presented for countries appearing both in the report and in the online version.

Countries, systems and regions