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Developed as one of the resources within the context of the OECD Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) project entitled 'Fostering and assessing creativity and critical thinking skills in higher education', this paper reviews existing policies and practices relating to the assessment of students' creativity and critical thinking skills in higher education across OECD countries.

Creativity and critical thinking are largely emphasised in policy orientations and qualification standards governing higher education in many countries. In contrast, these skills are sparsely integrated into the dimensions of centralised assessments administered at the level of systems. At the local level, because of the large degrees of institutional autonomy and academic freedom, there is little indication that policy orientations translate into actual transformation of assessment practices developed and implemented by faculty members. Based on this analysis, the paper provides recommendations for policy and decision makers in systems and institutions to further support the development and implementation of assessment strategies to measure and foster students' creativity and critical thinking in higher education.

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Existing estimates of the labor-market returns to human capital give a distorted picture of the role of skills across different economies. International comparisons of earnings analyses rely almost exclusively on school attainment measures of human capital, and evidence incorporating direct measures of cognitive skills is mostly restricted to early-career workers in the United States. Analysis of the new [Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies] PIAAC survey of adult skills over the full lifecycle in 22 countries shows that the focus on early-career earnings leads to underestimating the lifetime returns to skills by about one quarter. On average, a one-standard-deviation increase in numeracy skills is associated with an 18 per cent wage increase among prime-age workers. But this masks considerable heterogeneity across countries. Eight countries, including all Nordic countries, have returns between 12 and 15 per cent, while six are above 21 per cent with the largest return being 28 per cent in the United States. Estimates are remarkably robust to different earnings and skill measures, additional controls, and various subgroups. Intriguingly, returns to skills are systematically lower in countries with higher union density, stricter employment protection, and larger public-sector shares.

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The OECD Survey of Adult Skills is the jewel in the crown of its Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC). This paper argues that the findings and policy lessons from the project to date justify the high hopes which were placed in PIAAC when detailed planning for the project began in 2003. First, it presents a brief recap of PIAAC and its two predecessor international skills surveys. Second, it outlines the main themes which have been investigated to date using data from PIAAC. Third, the main findings and policy lessons drawn from PIAAC are highlighted. Finally, looking forward to the second cycle of PIAAC, for which planning is now underway, the paper suggests some priority areas for improvement to the survey design in order to add to its analytical usefulness and enhance its utility to policy makers.

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Module A of the OECD Higher Education Policy Survey (HEPS) 2022 elicited information on policies to promote digitalisation of higher education in OECD member and accession countries. In total, 30 jurisdictions responded, providing comparative information on various areas of digitalisation policy, from regulation and governance to financial and human resources. The survey results provide insight into the role of public authorities in guiding, coordinating and resourcing the digital transformation of higher education institutions. The analysis and comparative tables in this working paper provide insights that can support the development of strategic digitalisation policies.

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IQ tests and achievement tests do not capture non-cognitive skills - personality traits, goals, character and motivations that are valued in the labour market, in school and elsewhere. For many outcomes, their predictive power rivals or exceeds that of cognitive skills. Skills are stable across situations with different incentives. Skills are not immutable over the life cycle. While they have a genetic basis they are also shaped by environments, including families, schools and peers. Skill development is a dynamic process. The early years are important in shaping all skills and in laying the foundations for successful investment and intervention in the later years. During the early years, both cognitive and non-cognitive skills are highly malleable. During the adolescent years, non-cognitive skills are more malleable than cognitive skills. The differential plasticity of different skills by age has important implications for the design of effective policies. This paper reviews a variety of interventions across different stages of the life cycle. [The authors] interpret these studies using an economic model of skill development. Many effective programs work because they foster non-cognitive skills. Some have annual rates of return that are comparable to those from investments in the stock market. Parental involvement is an important component of successful early interventions just as successful adolescent mentoring is an age-appropriate version of parental involvement. Building an early base of skills that promote later-life learning and engagement in school and society is often a better strategy than waiting for problems to occur.

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This paper was written to support the G20 artificial intelligence (AI) dialogue. With the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), education faces two challenges: reaping the benefits of AI to improve education processes, both in the classroom and at the system level; and preparing students for new skillsets for increasingly automated economies and societies. AI applications are often still nascent, but there are many examples of promising uses that foreshadow how AI might transform education. With regard to the classroom, this paper highlights how AI can accelerate personalised learning, the support of students with special needs. At the system level, promising uses include predictive analysis to reduce dropout, and assessing new skillsets. A new demand for complex skills that are less easy to automate (e.g. higher cognitive skills like creativity and critical thinking) is also the consequence of AI and digitalisation. Reaching the full potential of AI requires that stakeholders trust not only the technology, but also its use by humans. This raises new policy challenges around 'trustworthy AI', encompassing the privacy and security of data, but also possible wrongful uses of data leading to biases against individuals or groups. The paper aims to provide a selected array of AI use cases in education and a glimpse into the opportunities and challenges raised by this technology, with a view to stimulating debate and providing sector-level insights into how the G20 AI Principles can be successfully implemented.

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This working paper seeks to explore the reasons why educational attainment in the immigrant population varies between North America and Europe. Specifically, the examples of Canada and Switzerland are used as Canada has an immigrant population with a typically higher rate of post-secondary education than that of the domestic population, while in Switzerland the opposite is true. Analysis shows that while differences in immigration policy play a significant role, there are many other variables which affect educational attainment in immigrants, such as the education level of the parents, source region and home language.

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Providing accurate, timely and relevant information about the requirements and consequences of study and career choices, and doing so in ways that cater to the complexity of intertemporal decision-making, is essential to support students to make good choices. This working paper seeks to help policy makers design information resources and levers that help learners to make better choices. It also gives a stocktake of the study and career choice websites in use in OECD countries. It sets out to provide actionable advice for policy makers to guide the design of effective information policy levers that support student choice. The paper provides responses to the following two research questions: What does behavioural economics tell us about the decision-making process and the factors that influence students' higher education choices? How can governments use the insights of behavioural economics when communicating labour market information to learners, helping them to discover previously unconsidered career options, and to make study and career choices well-matched to their interests and abilities, as well as labour market opportunities?

Starting with an overview of the factors at play when a young person faces a decision on choice of an educational pathway and career, the paper reviews key concepts of behavioural sciences as they apply to decision-making (sections 2 and 3), followed by a discussion of the role of labour market information in orienting study and career choice (section 4). The presentation of summary findings of a review of 34 public study and career choice websites in section 5 is followed by a conclusion (section 6).

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Digital technologies offer immense potential for transforming teacher learning and the delivery of professional development activities throughout teachers' careers. As the [Coronavirus Disease 2019] COVID-19 pandemic has made face-to-face professional learning challenging or impossible for teachers to attend in many contexts, online professional learning options for teachers have been receiving renewed attention. This paper puts forward research evidence on the effectiveness of various forms of online learning for teachers and adults, and examines prerequisite conditions for enhancing teacher learning through digital technologies. Teachers' engagement in online learning activities, as captured by OECD surveys, remained limited in many OECD countries before the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper provides a basis for investigating how policies can support teachers' engagement in professional learning using digital technologies and help strike a balance between system-level provision of online teacher professional learning opportunities and the facilitation of teacher-led initiatives.

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This paper analyses proficiency in literacy and numeracy in the countries that have participated in the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS, administered between 1994 and 1998), the Adult Literacy and Life Skills Survey (ALL, administered between 2003 and 2007) and the Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC, administered in 2012).

While many countries experienced small to modest changes in literacy proficiency between IALS and PIAAC, others saw sizeable variations, mostly on the negative side. In the shorter span that separated ALL and PIAAC, numeracy proficiency clearly declined (except in Italy), while literacy moved less on average (except for the large increase registered in Italy and the large decline experienced by Norway). Changes in the composition of the population have had little impact on observed changes in scores. Larger variations took place within different socio-demographic groups, but these tended to cancel each other out on aggregate. In particular, large variations are observed by age and levels of education. Older adults in PIAAC are generally more proficient than their IALS counterparts, probably due to the increase in educational attainments that took place over recent decades. On the contrary, tertiary-educated individuals appear to be on average less proficient than in the past, which may signal that the expansion of tertiary education has been accompanied by a decline in the average quality of university graduates (or of university instruction).

There is also no evidence that the change in delivery mode, with a switch to a computer-based assessment in PIAAC, had any significant effect on performance. However, the OECD is unable to ascertain how differences in implementation and technical standards affect the comparability of the data, so that a certain degree of caution should always be exercised in interpreting these results. Amongst the countries that experienced larger changes in literacy proficiency between surveys, a close inspection of IALS data (in particular through an investigation of response patterns at the item level) highlights some anomalies in Italy and Poland (and, to a lesser extent, in England and Northern Ireland), suggesting that particular caution should be exercised in interpreting the evolution of proficiency in these countries.

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