Building knowledge
To stay relevant to changing social and economic needs, education needs a good knowledge base, drawing on robust research and gathering and using evidence on innovation. But countries invest little in research about education—proportionately far less than on health, for example.

What does OECD do?
Education systems are not always very effective at accumulating knowledge and putting research and innovation to good use. OECD has a number of projects and programmes that aim to reverse this, many coordinated by OECD’s Centre for Educational Research and Innovation, or CERI.

As well as producing education indicators, OECD carries out country reviews on educational research and development. Other work includes the Knowledge Management Project, which promotes “knowledge management”—or ways of pooling knowledge and experience among educators. Schooling for Tomorrow helps planners use “futures thinking”—a methodology for devising alternative future scenarios and then assessing their relative merits.

There is also the New Millennium Learners project, which looks at the role of digital technologies in the learning and development of the “Internet generation”. Finally, OECD has also done work on how neuroscience is helping to create a new learning science.

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