More needs to be understood about knowledge and how it is used in education. This chapter suggests an agenda…
On the eve of the 21st century, many commentators talk and write about the knowledge-based economy, but few seriously conceptualise or describe what is meant by this term. There is an urgent need for analysis that identifies both its characteristics and dynamics and the most appropriate routes for policy develop-ment. Otherwise the “knowledge economy” will remain a slogan without sub-stance. This concluding chapter suggests some of the areas in which new knowledge about knowledge and learning processes in education will be useful.
As researchers in many disciplines become more interested in these issues, they will also become an important part of the agenda of the OECD as an organisation, again from many disciplinary perspectives.
… to follow on from the above analysis, which has only started to overcome barriers
to understanding.
Serious barriers have helped prevent knowledge, and indeed learning, from being analysed with sufficient precision. First, they are very difficult to measure (see Foray in Part II below). Secondly, the way in which we understand how knowl-edge is created, transferred and used remains partial, superficial and fragmented across several scientific disciplines; basic concepts have been expressed and interpreted in a variety of ways. So the production of knowledge remains a “black box” which we find it difficult to see inside. This report has tried to start opening up this box of “knowledge about knowledge”, but a great deal more work is needed if we are truly to open the box wide. A new research agenda is therefore needed to improve our understanding of knowledge and learning processes in education and in a broader context of the knowledge economy.
In this quest, different disciplines need to come together, and educators should draw from other sectors and learning
environments…
In pursuing this agenda, it will be important to bring disciplines together into a closer mutual framework of understanding. The present work, pursued by an educational unit within an economic organisation, has started to show how greater emphasis on the characteristics of knowledge and learning can complement eco-nomic traditions of analysis, which tend to treat knowledge as homogeneous.
More needs to be done to connect knowledge about learning/knowledge with knowledge about the economy and organisations. Such an approach also has implications for the analysis of the education sector, which has a great deal to learn about how knowledge is created, transmitted and applied in other sectors. It must do so in the first place to strengthen the overall conditions of knowledge manage-ment in schools, colleges, universities etc. In the second place, only by drawing widely on experiences in different settings and organisations can educators meet the challenge of offering lifelong learning for all and prepare students for the high-skill knowledge economies in which they will work.
… building
on the cross-sectoral insights presented in this report.
Although it remains a preliminary overview of the knowledge processes at work in different sectors, the report identifies a number of ways in which micro-level or sectoral understanding of the knowledge-based economy is important, alongside the more macro-level insights. These insights are valuable for govern-ments, economic sectors, and public and private enterprises and institutions
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when they are seeking to improve their knowledge and learning performance, which is increasingly important in order to stay competitive.
Research can be directed at:
– knowledge management, – its measurement, – its contribution to innovation in education, – educational R&D, and – learning sciences.
Five areas have been identified below as a framework of research issues to improve our understanding of knowledge and learning processes in educa-tion and in a broader context of the knowledge economy and society. First, the way in which knowledge and learning are managed by modern organisations and in the education system. Second, ways in which this knowledge can be identified and measured, whether by the organisations themselves or by pol-icy makers and the wider public. Third, specifically in education, how improved knowledge management may create organisations that become more effective at learning and innovating than they have been in the past.
Fourth, the challenge to R&D systems within education to become a more effective part of knowledge management in this sector, potentially by creating new structures that bring them closer to policy making and practice. Finally, the pursuit of a specific breakthrough in the knowledge used by education, by bringing together brain specialists and learning specialists to pursue a better understanding of learning processes.
Area 1: Management of knowledge and learning The above cross-sectoral
analysis could be developed further.
A comparative study of the production, mediation and use of knowledge in different sectors has been undertaken in chapter 2 to achieve two purposes: first, to illuminate the general nature of these processes in modern economies; and sec-ondly, to clarify how the education sector manages knowledge and how it might do so better. The comparison gives some understanding and tools that allow people who work in a firm or institution in a sector to see these processes more clearly in relation to other sectors. Such an approach could certainly be developed further.
Knowledge management has replaced the scientific management of industrial processes…
The management of knowledge and human resources has, in several eco-nomic sectors, become the drivers of production. In 1900, “Scientific manage-ment” studied and aimed to improve factory processes; in the “knowledge intensive firm” of 2000, managers aim to improve the production and use of knowledge. Good knowledge management involves the recognition and use of intellectual capital, the creation and sustaining of a knowledge culture and the construction of a knowledge infrastructure that can be harnessed effectively both within and outside a firm’s institutional boundaries.
… but knowledge is less amenable to manipulation than physical procedures.
Yet knowledge management resists the engineering and planning tools available to scientific management of physical processes. As previous chapters have shown, knowledge is “slippery” and closely linked to the people who hold it; its categories and meanings change frequently. The expert systems movement of the 1980s confirmed how difficult it is to create rules that cover even narrow knowledge domains and even more difficult to update and modify the structure. Moreover, because the position of knowledge often is closely linked with power structures within an organisation, changes introduced by knowledge management can be seen as a threat and sometimes met with resis-tance within the organisation. These factors will have to be taken into account in the analysis proposed below.
Limitations in knowledge management in some public services are regrettable…
Some of the largest public services like the education and health sectors seem in some respects to lag behind in the development of an innovative knowledge infrastructure. This might be seen as unfortunate, as the manage-ment of knowledge is proving a key instrumanage-ment in the constant strive for inno-vation in the competitive environment of private business and can similarly be a powerful tool in the steady improvement of public services.
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ON THE RESEARCH AGENDA:
Needed: Case studies of knowledge management at the firm or organisation level in different sectors and countries, to set up benchmarking criteria.
Issues: How can organisations use knowledge more efficiently? What are the differences in knowledge management between the public and private sectors?
How do different professions manage knowledge? What are the characteristics of a learning organisation?
… and it will be a big task to steer
them towards a new mode of knowledge production and use…
Such work will build on the progress already obtained in the analysis of this report and it will continue the work on the characteristics of and changes in the high-tech industries for possible lessons for education and other sectors in how to manage knowledge. It will be a tremendous task for the education sector to move towards a Mode 2 knowledge production in Michael Gibbons’s sense: that which is applied, problem-focused, trans-displinary, demand-driven, entrepreneurial, accountability-tested, embedded in networks. In the higher education and lifelong learning market, increasing competition is likely to make it all the more important that institutions produce, transmit and use knowledge efficiently.
ON THE RESEARCH AGENDA:
In progress at the OECD: A major cross-directorate project, “The Growth Initiative”, has been launched to identify the determinants of and policies to strengthen overall economic growth. This project will, among other topics, explore the impact of innovation, knowledge and human capital on economic growth. There will be focus on the nature of human and social capital and evidence of the link between them and economic growth as well as other social outcomes.
Educational issues: How can schools and other educational institutions develop a commitment to knowledge management, which at present is at best uneven? What are the costs and benefits of knowledge transfer in education?
Can education institutions be given incentives to promote knowledge manage-ment and learning organisations? This again will have consequences for curric-ulum, teacher training, organisation of schools, etc.
… which is needed to bring together social capital with human capital, along with development strategies being pursued
across the OECD.
Learning organisations in which networking and effective management and sharing of knowledge occur can act as important engines of economic growth and social development. There is an important link between human and social capital, where the latter constitutes norms of trust, civic engagement and capacity to enter into fruitful social relations. Social capital can underpin effective learning and knowledge creation and at the same time the education and learning environment can foster social capital. Human capital investment can also play an important role in sustaining social infrastructure and through it economic growth where there is evidence of erosion of social cohesion and social capital over time. Policies that influence the production, transmission and use of human capital and knowledge in strategies of economic growth and social cohesion are being addressed across the OECD’s work.
Area 2: Towards new measurements of knowledge and learning
Knowledge
measurement can help identify gaps that need to be filled…
At the policy level, measurement and indicators can help policy makers to identify where outcomes fall short of expectation, or which intermediate factors determining outcomes require most attention. For these reasons, it is important to be able to estimate with greater accuracy the amount of knowledge and learn-ing in particular sectors, and the rate at which it is belearn-ing produced. If knowledge
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and learning drive productivity, as the notion of the “knowledge-based economy”
suggests, identifying and filling the gaps should be beneficial.
… but has so far been limited mainly to R&D and formal education.
Considerable progress has already been achieved in some aspects of the measurement, for example in measuring R&D and basic formal educational activities. The OECD has been the driving force in co-ordinating and setting up internationally comparative indicators in these areas. But Professor Foray’s analysis in Part II below demonstrates convincingly that the use and creation of knowledge overall are poorly measured. Thus, there is a need to develop new indicators.
It may be easier to measure conditions favourable to knowledge creation than knowledge itself…
One problem with defining a “common” stock of knowledge is that access to knowledge is in fact limited (see Chapter 1 above). A second problem is in classifying it by its economical usefulness. It is therefore difficult to produce simple, aggregate measures of either the stock of knowledge or the rate of its formation. It is, however, possible to produce instead indicators of the condi-tions favourable to its formation.
ON THE RESEARCH AGENDA:
In progress at the OECD: Investigation has begun in several Directorates of OECD into areas such as networks and clusters, which facilitate innovation, collaboration and the collective development of knowledge; mobility of highly qualified persons; the amount of job-related training; the development of frameworks for measuring company level intellectual capital; and the rate of enterprise creation and level of innovation across different sectors.
… but new ways of measuring competence are being developed…
Measurements of some of the crucial aspects of learning may be even more difficult. It is for example difficult to capture competence building through learn-ing. Many kinds of competence can only be revealed through application, rather than through testing in artificial contexts. But some forms of assessment can look more directly at competence than traditional tests based on learning curricula.
ON THE RESEARCH AGENDA:
Coming soon at the OECD: In the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), whose first full assessments are taking place in 2000, new measures of student cross-curricular competencies are being devel-oped. These will give some insight into the capacity of students to solve prob-lems in real life situations, such as in the workplace and the community. These measurements are important to get a better understanding of competence building by individual and its relationship to formal classroom learning.
… and there is scope to develop indicators further, provided many disciplines are involved, and international comparisons take account of cultural contexts.
A jointly organised seminar by the National Science Foundation and the OECD on Measurement of Knowledge in Learning Economies, May 1999 gave some lessons on how to develop the work on new indicators on knowledge and learning. First, it is important to have a cross-disciplinary approach in the work on constructing new indicators. It was emphasised that it should be carried out only as a part of an exercise that seeks to improve understanding of learning and tech-nology systems, and not just crude quantities of activity. In particular, the case-study approach, focusing on particular sectors and learning systems in countries, was seen as a fruitful way of developing a qualitative understanding that would help make sense of quantitative measures. Second, national and local institutions and institutional cultures do matter. What makes the education and learning systems of some countries work better than others, for example, can be a matter of local practice and social and/or cultural capital, rather than simply the overall volume of
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resources invested. These two lessons are important to keep in mind in the work with new indicators and especially in analysing and interpreting the indicators.
ON THE RESEARCH AGENDA:
Issues: Some of the challenges for the OECD will be to describe informal pro-cesses of the production of knowledge and learning that can explain perfor-mance. For example, can indicators of tacit knowledge be established? Can we get a better grasp of, which kinds of learning are important for which kinds of innovation; How can we measure the performance of learning organisations?
Can indicators be developed which show the role of social capital in the promo-tion of economic development including learning and innovapromo-tion? Empirical work on such questions is still in its infancy, but is starting to get underway.
Area 3: Policies of innovation in education
Innovation can be promoted not only in schools, but also elsewhere in education.
Some of the research issues mentioned under area 3 will be taken up in the OECD/CERI project on “Schooling for Tomorrow”. In this report, much of the discussion of the promotion of innovation has focused on schools, though many of the same arguments apply to the other levels in education systems.
While there is often greater diversity of institutional forms and partnerships in tertiary education, certain practices relating to teaching and learning are often even more traditional at this level than in schools. Hence, the research agenda below for the promotion of innovation is not restricted only to schools.
Little is known about the complex ways in which knowledge is transmitted
in education,
or the costs and efforts involved…
The report has shown the inadequacy of linear models relating to the pro-duction, use and transmission of knowledge. Innovation based on interaction and institutional-level innovation is more appropriate for today’s knowledge societies than a model of bureaucratic control. Particularly inappropriate is
“factory” models of schooling, rigidly “processing” students in terms of standar-dised inputs and outputs. The most complex, and least understood aspect of the innovation process is the final phase of “institutionalising” a change, by making it part of routine practice, yet not in a way that undermines the very cul-ture of innovation. In this process, very little is known about the “stickiness” of knowledge in education – the cost of efforts and resources required for knowl-edge transfer – whereas there is some research on this for other sectors.
ON THE RESEARCH AGENDA:
Ongoing work: Current work is aiming to create a deeper understanding of new models of schooling, especially those that function within mainstream sys-tems rather than on their periphery, and of the process and institutionalisation of innovation. Empirical clarification of the “stickiness” of knowledge in edu-cation, and the extent to which this represents a major barrier to innovation, would be valuable developments of this work.
… but it is clear that many schools are not “learning organisations”…
This report has discussed the way in which schools operate as organisations.
While they may be characterised as either “hierarchical” or “flat” organisationally, many cannot be realistically described as “learning organisations”. The nature of work within them frequently is highly individualised, and relatively low resources of time and money are devoted to the learning undertaken by personnel and man-agement. There may be powerful disincentives for teachers to engage in activities other than those perceived as the “core” teaching time on task, such as R&D and collective planning. Basic characteristics of dynamic organisations drawing on experience across different sectors – incorporating features such as teamwork,
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cohesion etc. – stand at odds with the organisational models typifying many educational institutions. This is not only about teachers and support staff: a key role in successful innovations is played by users – the students.
… and the ways teachers share their craft knowledge needs attention…
A considerable degree of attention has been devoted in the report to the nature of teacher work and the organisation and management of learning and knowledge within education. Teacher knowledge can often be characterised as a “craft”, based on tacit, non-technical and highly individualised knowledge.
This is a reflection in part of initial socialisation into teaching, in part of the cul-tures and organisations that prevail in schooling. There is considerable interest in examining new forms of professional identity and operations, opening up individualised practices. The role of networking – within and between institu-tions, and with professionals in other sectors – deserves particular attention.
ON THE RESEARCH AGENDA:
Issue for further investigation: How do versions of professional identity in various countries and educational settings influence their collective manage-ment of knowledge? The extent and forms of networking warrants close attention, including policies and initiatives that have proved successful in strengthening networking.
… but freeing schools from bureaucratic constraints raises equity issues.
Important equity considerations are raised by the promotion of innova-tion in educainnova-tion, with its corresponding de-emphasis of bureaucratic standardisation – which has in general been put in place to provide equality of opportunity. Is there a danger that more innovative, interactive forms of edu-cation may disproportionately favour the already-advantaged and, if so, what might be done to address these risks? Alternatively, situations of adversity may also promote innovative responses.
ON THE RESEARCH AGENDA:
Issue for investigation: What is the social distribution of innovation, and how strong is the risk that new schooling models will widen existing barriers and gaps. How can policy promote innovation in areas and for students most at risk of exclusion?
ICT can play a crucial role in radical change.
The role of information and communication technology (ICT) has been stressed as an integral element of all these issues. The report has highlighted the “exogenous” role of ICT in education as a major new “knowledge mediator”.
It has pointed to some key roles of ICT – in extending opportunities for net-working by both students and teachers, in forming a key part of radical change within school management, and in potentially opening new forms of teaching and learning, to existing and new students.
ON THE RESEARCH AGENDA:
Ongoing work: The ways in which schools are using ICT is being investigated, with particular emphasis on examining why the ICT has not always made the impact on the nature and outcomes of education that has been often expected, and what policy measures could improve its use.
New forms of learning require teachers to make big changes, for which they may best learn from each other.
It is widely acknowledged that lifelong learning and preparation for the knowledge economy call for student-centred, task-oriented, co-operative forms of learning, with an emphasis on acquiring the skills and habits of further learn-ing. This presents a radical challenge to a great deal of practice, especially
“factory” models of teaching based on very different assumptions. This challenge