Evaluating Education: Normative Systems and Institutional Practices

This open access book is the first account of the whole diversity of teacher education in the Nordic region: Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Greenland, the Faroe Islands, the Åland Islands and Sápmi (where the Sámi people live). Today, large parts of the world are looking to the Nordic model of social organization, and interest in the Nordic comprehensive school system and teacher education arrangements is no exception. A good education is a key to prosperity and well-being. And the quality of students’ education is undoubtedly linked to the quality of their teachers’ education.  While teacher education in the Nordic region is globally admired, it also faces new challenges. The leading scholars writing in this volume discuss the challenges and opportunities that professional environments are facing. By providing solid portraits of each area as well as analyses across the region, this book will be a great resource to students, academics in teacher education and schooling as well as social scientists and policy-makers inside and outside the Nordic region.

This is an open access book.

This volume addresses the central question facing the future of higher education around the world, whether and why universities need to exist at all. This book accepts the question’s premise: It is not clear that the university is any longer needed as an institution -- that is, unless its defenders recover what had made the university the revolutionary institution that over the past two centuries has not only defined the shape of modern systematic inquiry but also the distinctiveness of the societies that have housed them. In short, what is required is a reanimation of the spirit of Wilhelm von Humboldt for our times; hence the book's title and subtitle. Humboldt was responsible for relaunching the university as the vanguard institution of 'Enlightenment' to which we continue to pay lip service – and sometimes not much more than that. Admittedly, the task of relaunching Humboldt today is made difficult because many of the concrete achievements associated with the Humboldtian university – not least academic disciplines and nation-states – are increasingly seen as problematic if not obsolete. However, the global reach of the Humboldtian vision in its 19th century and 20th century heyday offers hope that it may be recovered in the 21st century. The book focuses on the performative character of the academic vocation, what Humboldt memorably characterized as the 'unity of research and teaching' in the same person, a role model for students and society at large. The book's seven chapters develop this theme in a historically and philosophically nuanced way in terms of the Humboldtian vision of knowledge, sense of free expression and critical judgement, and commitment to translation and publicity.

This open access book compares and analyses the results in twelve countries of the two latest international student assessments: Progress in International Reading Literacy Study 2021 (PIRLS) and the Programme for International Student Assessment 2022 (PISA) and tries to disentangle the effects of the pandemic from the long term trends in education.

It is one of the first, or maybe the first, published volumes to provide a global assessment of the devastating impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on student learning as measured by independent international comparative surveys.

The 12 countries discussed in this volume represent a wide variety of educational systems – including Chile, Ecuador, England, Estonia, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, and the United States. It compiles diverse scenarios including countries that are high performers; countries that perform at the OECD mean; and countries that are struggling to attain the OECD average. Each country has its history that reflects efforts to cope with pandemic school closures and to improve educational achievement.

A major topic discussed in this edited volume is related to understanding the diverse circumstances for the variations in results within different countries: Why did learning loss in specific locations? How much learning was lost? Why is a country continuously declining? Why is another country constantly improving? Why is there higher or less levels of inequality? How is a country regularly improving with an outdated curriculum? Which policies have worked, and which ones have not? What can we do now? This book is a valuable contribution to answer these concerns based on a diverse sample of countries and research questions.