The IEA IRC has officially started!
IEA Amsterdam Director Dr Andrea Netten chaired the opening ceremony with words of welcome from IEA Executive Director Dr Dirk Hastedt, IEA Chair Dr Thierry Rocher, and Undersecretary of the Activities Sector at the UAE Ministry of Education Dr Amna Al Dahak Al Shamsi. This marked the beginning of an animated day of speeches, discussions, and networking opportunities for our attendee education experts coming from all over the world.
Dr Mohammed Al Mualla of the UAE Ministry of Education kicked off the IEA IRC with a keynote speech on the challenges, opportunities, and trends facing education globally, and the UAE education system specifically.
Following Dr Mualla's speech, attendees could choose to attend hybrid, on-site, or online sessions on a myriad of topics such as, among others, IEA studies and publications, childhood learning, ILSA methodologies, data-informed policymaking, computer and information literacy, or teacher publications.
Today offered an important opportunity for researchers to connect with Dr Michael O. Martin and Dr Ina Mullis of IEA's TIMSS and PIRLS International Study Center at Boston College and to hear first-hand about the TIMSS 2019 initiative to develop computer-based and interactive Problem Solving and Inquiry (PSI) tasks for the digital age. Later in the day, IEA researcher Dr Yasin Afana dove deeper into TIMSS as a moderator of an expert panel on insights into the trends discovered in TIMSS score gaps.
Reflecting the diversity of education topics covered by IEA studies and publications, Dr Andres Sandoval Hernandez of the University of Bath moderated a symposium on good citizenship for the next generation based on IEA ICCS 2016 data.
We are grateful to all our on-site and online attendees for their engagement today, and look forward to exploring the plethora of education trends and challenges together in the next two days!