Balancing youth with social and emotional skills

Social and emotional skills play an essential role during all stages of life.  Along with cognitive and learning abilities, it is equally important that our youth develop social and emotional skills in order to balance and ground their personalities and strengthen their characters. This blog post on a new OECD publication,  "Skills for Social Progress",  was written by Lynda Hawe of the OECD Directorate for Education and Skills, as part of our focus on youth well-being during the Wikiprogress online consultation on Youth Well-being.

As we know from personal experiences, when we feel a deep sense of well-being we are far better able to absorb new information, take risks and be more responsible for our lives.  Now don’t we want that for all youth? 

But growing-up can often be quite a challenging period.  Ensuring that youth have a wide variety of skills to help them cope with some of life’s challenges may not always occur naturally.  Sometimes they will need help in building social and emotional skills - which are the kind of skills involved in achieving goals, working with others and managing emotions. 

Social and emotional skills play an essential role during all stages of life.  Fundamentally, along with cognitive and learning abilities, it is equally important that our youth develop social and emotional skills in order to balance and ground their personalities and strengthen their characters.  Some examples are:  Perseverance, which is the ability to keep going when things get tough and rough (like when the sports teacher demands that you to run another 10 laps of the pitch and you already feel exhausted).  Caring, which is the capacity to be kind to others and to be able to show and feel empathy (when you support an upset friend by listening and comforting them, irrespective of other priorities or personal time constraints).   Self-esteem, which means being able to feel good and being proud of your personal achievements, and comfortable with your physical appearances (regardless of any unpleasant comments from peers).

Luckily, some of these skills are flexible and adjustable when growing-up. This allows opportunities for policy makers, teacher and parents to provide the right kind of learning environments, in order to support and nurture them. The book Skills for Social Progress: The power of Social and Emotional Skills addresses the importance of these types of skills to enhance and balance lives.  It confirms international research studies that validate the need for a steady set of cognitive, social and emotional skill in order to succeed well in life.    In the past, we often thought that these types of skills couldn’t be successfully quantified.  In contrast, this report demonstrates that they can be measured meaningfully, within cultural and linguistic boundaries.  Additionally, the OECD will develop more measures and design an international comparative framework, in order to better grasp youth’s current and future needs for social and emotional skills.  Consequently, this report supplements the reflection on how future policies could best encourage and nurture the development of social and emotional skills, of course, working  closely with parents and teachers.

Not surprisingly, we need a wide range of diverse skills to contribute to the economy, support better social outcomes and build more unified and tolerant societies.  Cognitive abilities such as literacy and problem-solving remain crucial. Nonetheless, youth with strong social and emotional foundation skills thrive better in a highly dynamic labour market and rapidly changing world.  Investing in these skills will be central to addressing numerous socio-economic challenges, and for ensuring prosperous, healthy, engaged, responsible and happy youth.

More information

Centre for Educational Research and Innovation CERI

Education and Social Progress project

OECD Skills Strategy

Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies PIAAC website

Related blogs

Wikiprogress online consultation on Youth Well-being

A chance to design the way forward for education

This blog by Michael Ward of the OECD invites you to provide your views, on a set of indicators for measuring progress towards education targets for sustainable development, post 2015.

Want to get involved in shaping the future of education? As the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDG) reach their 2015 deadline, several international groups, including the OECD, are formulating a new set of goals and targets for sustainable development… and we’d like to know what you think.

The Open Working Group on Sustainable Development Goals (OWG), a UN-appointed task force, has proposed an agenda for development that includes goals for education, and educators from around the world have developed a set of specific education and learning targets that are closely aligned with that agenda.

The task now is to develop indicators so that progress towards achieving these new goals can be monitored.

To that end, a Technical Advisory Group, co-ordinated by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics and including members from the Education for All Global Monitoring Report, the OECD, UNESCO, UNICEF and the World Bank, has proposed a set of indicators, which you can find here.

We’d like to hear from you

What do you think about the indicators?

Until 30 January 2015 you are invited to comment on each indicator or to respond to these questions:

1. For each target, does the report identify the best indicators that are most aligned with the concept and are already being tracked in a large number of countries?

2. What new indicators could be developed to be more closely aligned with the proposed targets and have the potential to be globally comparable?

3. For each target, please identify or propose the two most important indicators.

4. Are there key issues that the document has not addressed satisfactorily or other issues that also need to be taken into consideration?

Please visit the UIS website for details on how to submit your comments.

To ensure that the consultation is open to as many people as possible, we invite you to spread the word among your networks and social media, referencing #Education2015.

After 30 January 2015, the Technical Advisory Group will review the list of indicators based on your feedback. The final proposal will be submitted for endorsement at the World Education Forum in Incheon (Korea) in May 2015. The final documents will then form the basis of the discussions at the UN General Assembly in September 2015 on the new UN goals for education.

Join the discussion on twitter via @EFAReport @UNESCO @WBEducation @OECD_Edu @UNICEFEducation and #Education2015.

by Michael Ward
Senior Policy Analyst, Development Co-operation Directorate

This post first appeared on the OECD Educationtoday blog site, here. 

Counting Pennies: A new PISA report compares students’ financial know-how

This blog is written by Wikichild co-ordinator Melinda Deleuze. The post presents findings from the latest PISA report, highlighting the links between students' financial literacy levels and their socio-economic background. It is a part of the Wikiprogress spotlight on Education and Skills.

The importance of financial literacy among young people is growing, as more adolescents have access to financial services, have their own bank accounts, make independent financial decisions, and are often in paid employment as well as school. More than ever, the ability of students to manage their finances is central to their immediate and future well-being. Furthermore, rising tuition costs, and the increasing burden of student debt, is a major issue in countries around the world. Earlier this year in Chile, an activist burnt student debt papers worth $500 million in protest of widespread student poverty. Financial literacy is therefore of key importance, not just at the individual level, in terms of enabling young people to avoid or minimise debt or to plan for a more financially-secure future, but also at the societal level.

Queen Maxima of the Netherlands
at the PISA launch

On Wednesday, the OECD launched Volume VI of the PISA 2012 results entitled “Students and Money: Financial Literacy Skills for the 21st Century.” This part of the PISA survey, the first ever cross-national evaluation of financial literacy among young people, involved 29,000 students from 18 countries. The 15 year-olds are asked questions with 5 different levels of questions, from recognising the purpose of an invoice (Level 1) to identifying which loan is the best offer.

(You can take the test here!)

Average scores in all participating countries

Across the 18 countries, students show a wide range of financial skills and knowledge. Shanghai-China students had the strongest performance with a mean score of 603 points, while Colombian students averaged the lowest mean score of 379 points. A majority of the countries are in a tighter point span, ranging from 520 to 480, such as the United States (492 points) and France (486 points). 

Distribution of differences in scores

However, even within countries students demonstrate varying levels of financial literacy. In New Zealand, the top 5% of students score around 700 score points, while the bottom 5% score around 300 points. This 400-point difference equates to about 10 years of schooling.

In addition to providing results on students’ financial literacy levels, the report also explores the relationships between financial literacy and other factors (including gender, rural vs. urban, immigration, mathematics performance, attitudes and socio-economic background). The relationship between socio-economic status and financial literacy comes across as especially important to acknowledge, as it shows a system’s ability to break vicious cycles of inequality and promote truly inclusive growth. In a successful system, students would obtain higher levels of financial literacy regardless of the parents’ level of education, income or wealth. Also, a system which does not rely on parents to transmit financial literacy has greater chances of reducing inequalities in household wealth in the long-term.

Across the 13 participating OECD countries, financial literacy performance increases by 41 score points with every one-unit increase in the PISA index of socio-economic status (ESCS). This score gap represents the equivalent to about one extra year of schooling for students who have above-average family wealth and additional educational resources at home The difference between the students in the top quarter and bottom quarter of socio-economic index amounts to 91 score points (over two years of schooling). A students’ socio-economic status, therefore, explains a large proportion of the variation in financial literacy in OECD countries, more so than gender or immigrant background. 

% variation explained by socio-economic status

Estonia appears to be the champion of breaking socio-economic boundaries in this field, with only a 53-point difference between the students in the top quarter and the bottom quarter of socio-economic status. It is the only country whose students overall have an above-average financial literacy performance, and that has a weak association between financial literacy performance and socio-economic status. It achieves high performance without leaving behind the disadvantaged students.  

Parents’ life decisions also impact students’ financial know-how. Both parents’ occupation and their level of education are strongly related to students’ financial literacy performance in the OECD countries. The financial literacy performance of students with at least one parent with tertiary education differs by an average of 40 score points in comparison to those whose parents do not have a higher education degree. Again, that corresponds to one year of schooling. There is a large range among the countries’ average differences, from Israel’s 79-point difference to Italy’s 9-point difference.

In all countries, the students with at least one parent in a skilled occupation, such as a manager or professional, have a higher financial literacy score than students whose parents work in semi-skilled or low-skilled occupations. The average difference in financial literacy performance between these student groups is 54 points. However, the variation among countries for parents’ occupation is not as stark as it is for parents’ education. Israel has a 75-point difference, while both Italy and the Russian Federation show the smallest differences with 34 points each. Overall, these results show that home-related factors do impact a student’s performance and financially literate parents could make a difference of a year of schooling.

Fortunately, governments are already taking this important issue to heart, with over 50 countries implementing a national strategy for financial education, compared to 10 countries in 2008. The next assessment of students’ financial literacy will to be taken in 2015, allowing for the first comparison of change over time. Fingers-crossed for more good examples like Estonia by then!

Melinda Deleuze 

*The graphs used in this post were presented at the report's launch on 9 July, 2014.

What’s at the root of women’s absence in STEM occupations?

This blog was written by Marilyn Achiron, the editor for the OECD's Directorate for Education and Skills. Despite genuine and enormous progress in education and the labour force over the past few decades, women are still under-represented in the fields of technology, mathematics and science and in high-wage occupations. Why? This blog is part of the OECD's contribution to celebrate International Women's Day.

If you sift through all the education data the OECD has produced over the past year, you’ll come up with decidedly mixed results when it comes to women’s (and girls’) progress. Education at a Glance 2013 told us that gender gaps in educational attainment are not only narrowing, but are, in some cases, reversing, and that women are now more likely than men to enter and complete a university-level programme. Results from the first Survey of Adult Skills, a product of the OECD Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), found that gender differences in the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) have narrowed considerably among 16-24 year-olds, and that, among younger adults, there is, on average, no gender difference in proficiency in numeracy or literacy. In fact, in those countries where there is a difference between young men’s and young women’s levels of literacy, it is young women who score higher.

So, given these data, we have reason to be optimistic.

Unfortunately, this is only part of the story; there are also some other data to consider: Education at a Glance revealed that, among tertiary-educated adults, women still earn less than men (only in Austria, Belgium, Finland, New Zealand, Slovenia and Spain do the earnings of tertiary-educated women amount to 75% or more of men’s earnings; in Brazil, Chile and Estonia, university-educated women earn 65% or less of what similarly educated men earn). What might explain these gender-related disparities in pay?

As the publication also reported, women are still less likely than men to work full time; and 15-29 year-old women are twice as likely as men the same age to be neither in the labour force nor looking for a job. Meanwhile, the Survey of Adult Skills found that in all countries that participated in the survey, similar proportions of men (36%) as women (32%) are proficient in using ICTs. But the survey also found that in 15 of 23 participating countries, men use ICT at work significantly more often than women do – and that the extent to which problem-solving skills are used at work accounts for nearly half the gender gap in wages.

One of the most troubling of findings comes from the PISA 2012 survey of 15-year-old students. Based on information gathered from students through questionnaires, PISA found that, even among the highest-achieving girls (many of whom perform just as well as boys in mathematics), girls have self-sabotaging attitudes towards mathematics. They are more likely to feel anxious towards mathematics, and have less confidence in their own mathematical skills and in their ability to solve mathematics problems than boys.

These attitudes have repercussions later on, as can be seen in other data from Education at a Glance. That publication reports that, in 2011, an average of only 14% of women entering university-level education enrolled in science-related fields (which include science and engineering) or in manufacturing and construction, compared to 39% of men who entered this level of education in these fields. If so few women aim for the so-called STEM professions (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), there will continue to be few role models in these fields for young girls to emulate, and the cycle will simply perpetuate itself.

What all these data, combined, tell us is that we have no reason to be complacent. The gender gap in students’ self-beliefs about their abilities in mathematics has remained stable in most countries since 2003. In the short term, changing these mindsets may require making mathematics more interesting to girls, identifying and eliminating gender stereotypes in textbooks, promoting female role models, and using learning materials that appeal to girls. Over the longer term, shrinking the gender gap in mathematics performance will require the concerted effort of parents, teachers and society, as a whole, to change the clichéd notions of what boys and girls excel at, what they enjoy doing, and what they believe they can achieve.

Girls and women have made genuine and enormous gains in education and in the labour force over the past half century; but as long as girls continue to tell themselves that they’re no good at math – or science or engineering or any other subject where men have traditionally dominated – even in the face of hard evidence to the contrary, then we’re still losing half of our talent to the destructive power of stereotypes.

- Marilyn Achiron

For related blogs on education see the OECD's educationtoday blog.


See Also:
Education at a Glance 2012
Gender Equality in Education, Employment and Entrepreneurship
Education
Education and Skills Category
 

Trust in Government: Causes, consequences and solutions

This blog post on trust in governments is a compilation of presentations given at the OECD Workshop entitled "Joint Learning for an OECD Trust Strategy", held on 14 October 2013. The post, composed by Melinda Deleuze, is part of Wikiprogress' December spotlight on governance.

During the workshop, a variety of topics were discussed regarding trust in governments. Some common themes were why measuring trust is important, how to measure trust, the reflection of trust in governments on quality of governments, the crisis' impact on trust and reasons for lack of trust.

To give some highlights:

• Trust in government is intermingled with many other areas, namely:
• policy effectiveness
• economic policy
• the economy
• the economic crisis
• compliance
• accountability
• regulation
• education
• social capital

• After the crisis, in Iceland, trust in institutions remained relatively high, trust in politicians very low, and voter turnout relatively high.
• To strengthen the quality of government, there should be:
• free universal education
• universal social services/insurance systems
• fairness (impartiality) in the implementation of public policies
• merit-based recruitment and promotion to the civil service
• gender equality

•  Unemployment has a strong, negative effect on trust in public institutions. 

In the presentation below, Yann Algan discusses the relationships between institutions, inequality/segmentation and trust. He also examines how to identify impact of policy on trust.

In the presentation below, Tracy Burns discusses trends in governance and education, satisfaction with the education system, accountability, and positive outcomes possible with educated adults.

 

In the presentation below,  Diane Coyle discusses how trust affects the economy and the challenges faced.

In the presentation below, Dóra Györffy discusses trust in-depth including its relationship with decision-making, economic policy, popularity of government and its influence on the crisis.

In the presentation below, Pall Thorhallsson discusses the pre-crash situation, the nature of the 2008 crash, and the crash's impact on trust. He also mentions reasons for the lacking trust.

 

In the presentation below, Marco Mira d’Ercole discusses the interest and importance of trust, how trust should be measured and trust's broader relationship with the quality of democratic institutions.

 

In the presentation below, Felix Roth discusses the consequences of citizens declining trust and the driving factors of declining trust in Europe. He also provides an econometric analysis of trust and unemployment.

In the presentation below,  Bo Rothstein discusses how to capture the quality of government and its impact on social trust. He also provides suggestions for what can be done to strengthen quality of government.

In the presentation below, Frédérique Six discusses effective regulation, the trust triangle, compliance and a trust regime.

In the presentation below,  Mario Solis-Garcia discusses why trust matters and uses a simple economic model to see how government trust influences environment, government, households and timing.