I do realize the title above may appear to be an alphabet soup of confusion, but the translation is this: there is a new, terrific, endorsement of the quality of the CWRA test (something I advocate for here frequently) from the OECD, the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, the very important transnational body of 31 leading industrial nations.

The OECD already does a good job with its international assessment of the knowledge application skills, the PISA, a test which asks of 15 year-olds  the valuable questions “Can they analyse, reason and communicate effectively? Do they have the capacity to continue learning throughout life?”  (I am still trying to determine whether US indepedent schools can draw upon PISA for assessment of these things)

But now, according to an article in Chronicle of Higher Ed, “New OECD project will compare Student Learning Across Countries,” the OECD, as it seeks to engineer a tool to compare higher education learning outcomes, has selected the Council for Aid to Education’s Collegiate Learning Assessment.

To determine to what extent generic skills can be measured across diverse institutions, languages and cultures, the feasibility study is adapting the Collegiate Learning Assessment, an instrument developed by the Council for Aid to Education in the United States, to an international context. The online assessment will seek to measure generic skills, such as problem solving, critical thinking, and practical application of theory.

The CAE’s CLA is pretty much exactly the same as the CAE’s CWRA, what I think is the single most important assessment available for high schools to measure their effectiveness at educating students toward these essential 21st century skills, and that the OECD has made this selection is, by my lights, a huge favorable endorsement.    Congratulations to CAE.   (And to repeat something very often uttered here [apologies], St. Gregory remains proud to be the first high school in Arizona to adopt the CWRA as a tool to measure and guide our success in educating our students for these valuable skills.