The 11th IRC is dedicated to the theme "Researching Education for Sustainable Futures" to focus on the importance of education for individuals and societies, as well as the role of IEA studies in making education systems more relevant, inclusive, and just.
Each day of the three-day conference will feature a keynote lecture, parallel sessions, and symposia giving participants access to various topics in educational research and assessment.
Each session will include several presentations organized around themes related to one or more of the IEA studies (such as ICCS, ICILS, PIRLS, and/or TIMSS), methodology and analysis in large-scale assessment, learning and teaching practice in international education, using IEA data for evaluation or development at national and regional levels, and the policy implications of research.
The IEA IRC will include time for discussion and informal interactions between researchers from across the globe to encourage a lively exchange of ideas.
More information about the program of the IRC 2025 will be available soon.
The registration deadline for presenters is 18 April 2025, and the registration deadline for all other participants is 9 May 2025. You can register for the IRC here.
Each day, the conference will begin with a plenary session dedicated to a keynote lecture focusing on one of the conference’s strands. These sessions will dive further into the field of research education, offer new perspectives, and facilitate discussion among the IEA IRC participants.
Almost forty years have passed since the Brundtland Commission Report (1987) defined sustainable development as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. Thus, time is a critical dimension of sustainability and a foundation for inter-generational solidarity. However, the variety of interpretations generally associated with sustainable development makes it open to internal contradictions, particularly when it is translated into educational practices.
Two main strands can be found in Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). The first implies the possibility of reproducing students’ sustainability behaviours according to a well-formed environmental awareness. Expected outcomes are envisaged in advance in terms of knowledge, attitudes, and behaviours that pursue sustainability in the community. The second focuses instead on encouraging students’ inquiry and engagement with environmental issues without a pre-defined solution to the problems considered. This approach is based on active and problem-based learning, and it is more in line with considering ESD as an endeavour of continual learning rather than a final goal to be accomplished.
Probably due to its intrinsic complexity, implementing ESD has been proven to be a long journey. Providing students with the skills they would need to implement change requires time and it does not always ensure the enactment of the expected behaviours in the future. Therefore, specifically in secondary education, it is helpful to collect examples of teaching strategies to engage students in meaningful ESD activities that go beyond the classroom, following a whole-school approach.
This talk will outline how IEA studies offer not only a consistent and wide set of data to measure progress in improving student outcomes toward the promotion of a sustainable future, but also possible examples of interactive and student-centered teaching strategies for teachers and schools to enhance students’ understanding of sustainability, such as discussing issues in an open classroom climate or problem-based activities in the local community. The talk will also stress that time is of the essence, both as a conceptual axis of teaching strategies, and strictu sensu, for the rapid environmental transformations we are facing.
The notion of “greening education” is meant to convey a broad array of interventions and reforms in education systems (e.g., UNESCO websites, reports, and the 2022 Transforming Education Summit declaration). Drawing on earlier understandings of environmental education (EE) and Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), greening education can reflect several interrelated processes, including:
- The prioritization and inclusion of “green” content (e.g., related to environment, biodiversity, climate, sustainability) in the intended and implemented curriculum;
- The updating and upgrading of school infrastructure to reduce carbon emissions and protect against the effects of climate change;
- The preparation of teachers who can engage in holistic pedagogy and interdisciplinary approaches to the teaching of content related to climate change, biodiversity and sustainability;
- The modification of learning assessments to assess whether learners acquire contextually relevant knowledge, skills, values and agency to make informed decisions and take action to change their communities, mitigate and adapt to the climate crisis and care for the planet; and
- The improvement of relations between schools, communities and Indigenous groups to foster intergenerational learning on future sustainability challenges and solutions.
This presentation describes recent cross-national research by the MECCE project and UNESCO into the “greening” of the school curriculum in primary and secondary education. It also presents data on a new Greening Education Indicator with relevance to the measurement and monitoring of SDG Targets 4.7 and 13.3. It briefly reports exploratory analyses of macrolevel factors associated with variation in greening education. The presentation concludes by discussing the potential teaching and learning consequences—intended and unintended—of trends in greening education.
Methodologists have long bemoaned the media-driven, excessive focus on league tables and changes in country rankings across cycles: These have little relevance for policymakers and educators, and mostly serve to distract attention from the truly useful information generated by international large-scale assessments. One constructive alternative is to conduct cross-national comparisons of growth within strata defined by one or more relevant student and/or contextual characteristics. Differences can be expressed in terms of changes in effect sizes based on sample means.
This talk will present a rather different approach to the problem – one that employs pairs of Q-Q plots and provides a more granular picture than one utilizing sample means. Moreover, unlike comparisons based on means, this approach is essentially scale-independent and yields evocative visual representations. It is intended to be used as an exploratory tool and not as a basis for inference. The method is illustrated with data from TIMSS 2015 and TIMSS 2019, presenting comparisons both within and between countries, along with substantive interpretations of the results.
The presentation continues with a discussion of the relationship between these different approaches to comparisons of growth, as well as some of their limitations. The talk concludes with an attempt to place this type of analysis within a larger framework for empirical methodology.
It is clear from the three pillars of sustainability, the Brundtland Report, and the 17 Sustainable Development Goals of the UN's 2023 Agenda, that the concepts of sustainability and sustainable development have expanded and become more complex. Consequently, the range of issues that policies must address have also increased. Therefore, education research is essential to know the current situation, identify which factors have shaped it, highlight strengths and weaknesses, and illuminate needs.
However, the relationship between research and policy must maintain distinct roles. Research is responsible for providing data and evidence, and verifying interventions and results. Data is necessary but does not provide solutions. Choices are inherently political; research is essential to determine whether the processes and effects generated align with the desired outcomes.
The prevalent view today is that the future is uncertain and uncontrollable. However, the campaign for education for a sustainable future promotes the idea that a sustainable future is possible if people are educated in a certain way, implying that it is indeed shapeable and under our control. Education is thus seen as training for achieving a specific aim, with the future viewed as a closed concept where learners’ futures are predictable. This implies a shortsighted view of education itself, missing its potentials for the societal transformation.
This contrast urges research to investigate how education can drive social change. The talk will show that educational research can be a resource for a sustainable future, but only if it offers solid evidence to guide policies and practices to pursue the development of continuous learning, reflective, and transformative skills, rather than of a list of distinct competences.
This perspective faces at least two main obstacles in the Italian policy context: a) the limited attention to educational research; b) the turnover of interventions that do not extend beyond individual political factions or governments, responding to immediate emergencies rather than to building the future through a comprehensive vision of education.
More information about the social program of the IRC 2025 will be available soon.
In partnership with National Institute for the Educational Evaluation of Instruction and Training (INVALSI).
In partnership with the Rectorate and the Department of Education of Roma Tre University.
To be hosted at the Department of Humanities at Roma Tre University.