assignment importance of education

EdTrust in Texas advocates for an equitable education for Black and Latino students and students from low-income backgrounds across the state. We believe in centering the voices of Texas students and families as we work alongside them for the better future they deserve.

Our mission is to close the gaps in opportunity and achievement that disproportionately impact students who are the most underserved, with a particular focus on Black and Latino/a students and students from low-income backgrounds.

EdTrust–New York is a statewide education policy and advocacy organization focused first and foremost on doing right by New York’s children. Although many organizations speak up for the adults employed by schools and colleges, we advocate for students, especially those whose needs and potential are often overlooked.

EdTrust-Tennessee advocates for equitable education for historically-underserved students across the state. We believe in centering the voices of Tennessee students and families as we work alongside them for the future they deserve.

EdTrust–West is committed to dismantling the racial and economic barriers embedded in the California education system. Through our research and advocacy, EdTrust-West engages diverse communities dedicated to education equity and justice and increases political and public will to build an education system where students of color and multilingual learners, especially those experiencing poverty, will thrive.

The Education Trust in Louisiana works to promote educational equity for historically underserved students in the Louisiana’s schools. We work alongside students, families, and communities to build urgency and collective will for educational equity and justice.

EdTrust in Texas advocates for an equitable education for historically-underserved students across the state. We believe in centering the voices of Texas students and families as we work alongside them for the better future they deserve.

EdTrust in Washington advocates for an equitable education for historically-underserved students across the state. We believe in centering the voices of Washington students and families as we work alongside them for the better future they deserve.

Massachusetts

The Education Trust team in Massachusetts convenes and supports the Massachusetts Education Equity Partnership (MEEP), a collective effort of more than 20 social justice, civil rights and education organizations from across the Commonwealth working together to promote educational equity for historically underserved students in our state’s schools.

Home – Blog – Classroom Assignments Matter. Here’s Why.

Classroom Assignments Matter. Here’s Why.

As a former classroom teacher, coach, and literacy specialist, I know the beginning of the school year demands that educators pay attention to a number of competing interests. Let me…

As a former classroom teacher, coach, and literacy specialist, I know the beginning of the school year demands that educators pay attention to a number of competing interests. Let me suggest one thing for teachers to focus on that, above all else, can close the student achievement gap: the rigor and quality of classroom assignments.

Digging into classroom assignments is revealing. It tells a story about curricula, instruction, achievement, and education equity. In the process, it uncovers what teachers believe about their students, what they know and understand about their standards and curricula, and what they are willing to do to advance student learning and achievement. So, when educators critically examine their own assignments (and the work students produce), they have an opportunity to gain powerful insight about teaching and learning — the kind of insight that can move the needle on student achievement. This type of analysis can identify trends across content areas such as English/language arts, science, social studies, and math.

At Ed Trust, we undertook such an analysis of 4,000 classroom assignments and found that students are being given in-school and out-of-school assignments that don’t align with grade-level standards, lack sufficient opportunities and time for writing, and include tasks that require low-level thinking and work production. We’ve seen assignments with little-to-no meaningful discussion and those with teachers over-supporting students, which effectively rob students of the kind of challenging thinking that leads to academic growth. And we’ve seen assignments where the reading looked like stop-and-go traffic, overrun with prescribed note-taking, breaking down students’ ability to build reading flow and deep learning.

These findings served as the basis for our second Equity in Motion convening. For three days this summer, educators from across the country explored the importance of regular and thoughtful assignment analysis. They found that carefully developed assignments have the power to make a curriculum last in students’ minds. They saw how assignments reveal whether students are grasping curricula, and if not, how teachers can adapt instruction. They also saw how assignments give clues into their own beliefs about students, which carry serious equity implications for all students, especially those who have been traditionally under-served. Throughout the convening, educators talked about the implications of their assignments and how assignments can affect overall achievement and address issues of equity. If assignments fall short of what standards demand, students will be ill-equipped to achieve at high levels.

The main take-away from this convening was simple but powerful: Assignments matter!

I encourage all teachers to take that message to heart. This school year, aim to make sure your assignments are more rigorous, standards-aligned, and authentically relevant to your students. Use our Literacy Analysis Assignment Guide to examine your assignments — alone, or better yet, with colleagues — to ensure you’re delivering assignments that propel your students to reach higher and achieve more. Doing this will provide a more complete picture of where your students are in their learning and how you can move them toward skill and concept mastery.

Remember this: Students can do no better than the assignments they receive.

Improving Student Access to Empowering, Rigorous Content Webinar Series

Empowering our nation’s students to become well-rounded individuals — equipped to navigate the complexities of our world, contribute to an inclusive society, and achieve their own biggest dreams — starts…

A survey conducted by the Associated Press has revealed that around 58% of parents feel that their child has been given the right amount of assignments. Educators are thrilled that the majority has supported the thought of allocating assignments, and they think that it is just right.

However, the question arises when students question the importance of giving assignments for better growth. Studies have shown that students often get unsuccessful in understanding the importance of assignments.

What key purpose does an assignment have? They often question how an assignment could be beneficial. Let us explain why a teacher thinks it is best to allot assignments. The essential functions of assigning tasks or giving assignments come from many intentions. 

What is the Importance of Assignment- For Students 

The importance of the assignment is not a new concept. The principle of allocating assignments stems from students’ learning process. It helps teachers to evaluate the student’s understanding of the subject. Assignments develop different practical skills and increase their knowledge base significantly. As per educational experts, mastering a topic is not an impossible task to achieve if they learn and develop these skills.  

Cognitive enhancement 

While doing assignments, students learn how to conduct research on subjects and comprise the data for using the information in the given tasks. Working on your assignment helps you learn diverse subjects, compare facts, and understand related concepts. It assists your brain in processing information and memorizing the required one. This exercise enhances your brain activity and directly impacts cognitive growth. 

Ensured knowledge gain   

When your teacher gives you an assignment, they intend to let you know the importance of the assignment. Working on it helps students to develop their thoughts on particular subjects. The idea supports students to get deep insights and also enriches their learning. Continuous learning opens up the window for knowledge on diverse topics. The learning horizon expanded, and students gained expertise in subjects over time.      

Improve students’ writing pattern 

Experts have revealed in a study that most students find it challenging to complete assignments as they are not good at writing. With proper assistance or teacher guidance, students can practice writing repetitively.

It encourages them to try their hands at different writing styles, and gradually they will improve their own writing pattern and increase their writing speed. It contributes to their writing improvement and makes it certain that students get a confidence boost. 

Increased focus on studies 

When your teachers allocate a task to complete assignments, it is somehow linked to your academic growth, especially for the university and grad school students. Therefore, it demands ultimate concentration to establish your insights regarding the topics of your assignments.

This process assists you in achieving good growth in your academic career and aids students in learning concepts quickly with better focus. It ensures that you stay focused while doing work and deliver better results.         

Build planning & organization tactics

Planning and task organization are as necessary as writing the assignment. As per educational experts, when you work on assignments, you start planning to structurize the content and what type of information you will use and then organize your workflow accordingly. This process supports you in building your skill to plan things beforehand and organize them to get them done without hassles.   

Adopt advanced research technique

Assignments expand the horizon of research skills among students. Learners explore different topics, gather diverse knowledge on different aspects of a particular topic, and use useful information on their tasks. Students adopt advanced research techniques to search for relevant information from diversified sources and identify correct facts and stats through these steps.  

Augmenting reasoning & analytical skills 

Crafting an assignment has one more sign that we overlook. Experts have enough proof that doing an assignment augments students’ reasoning abilities. They started thinking logically and used their analytical skills while writing their assignments. It offers clarity of the assignment subject, and they gradually develop their own perspective about the subject and offer that through assignments.     

Boost your time management skills 

Time management is one of the key skills that develop through assignments. It makes them disciplined and conscious of the value of time during their study years. However, students often delay as they get enough time. Set deadlines help students manage their time. Therefore, students understand that they need to invest their time wisely and also it’s necessary to complete assignments on time or before the deadline.  

What is the Importance of Assignment- Other Functions From Teacher’s Perspective: 

Develop an understanding between teacher and students  .

Teachers ensure that students get clear instructions from their end through the assignment as it is necessary. They also get a glimpse of how much students have understood the subject. The clarity regarding the topic ensures that whether students have mastered the topic or need further clarification to eliminate doubts and confusion. It creates an understanding between the teaching faculty and learners. 

Clarity- what is the reason for choosing the assignment 

The Reason for the assignment allocated to students should be clear. The transparency of why teachers have assigned the task enables learners to understand why it is essential for their knowledge growth. With understanding, the students try to fulfill the objective. Overall, it fuels their thoughts that successfully evoke their insights. 

Building a strong relationship- Showing how to complete tasks 

When a teacher shows students how to complete tasks, it builds a strong student-teacher relationship. Firstly, students understand the teacher’s perspective and why they are entrusted with assignments. Secondly, it also encourages them to handle problems intelligently. This single activity also offers them the right direction in completing their tasks within the shortest period without sacrificing quality. 

Get a view of what students have understood and their perspective 

Assigning a task brings forth the students’ understanding of a particular subject. Moreover, when they attempt an assignment, it reflects their perspective on the specific subject. The process is related to the integration of appreciative learning principles. In this principle, teachers see how students interpret the subject. Students master the subject effectively, whereas teachers find the evaluation process relatively easy when done correctly. 

Chance to clear doubts or confusion regarding the assignment  

Mastering a subject needs practice and deep understanding from a teacher’s perspective. It could be possible only if students dedicate their time to assignments. While doing assignments, students could face conceptual difficulties, or some parts could confuse them. Through the task, teachers can clear their doubts and confusion and ensure that they fully understand what they are learning.   

Offering individualistic provisions to complete an assignment 

Students are divergent, and their thoughts are diverse in intelligence, temperaments, and aptitudes. Their differences reflect in their assignments and the insight they present. This process gives them a fair understanding of students’ future and their scope to grow. It also helps teachers to understand their differences and recognize their individualistic approaches.  

Conclusion:

You have already become acquainted with the factors that translate what is the importance of assignments in academics. It plays a vital role in increasing the students’ growth multifold. 

TutorBin is one of the best assignment help for students. Our experts connect students to improve their learning opportunities. Therefore, it creates scopes of effective education for all, irrespective of location, race, and education system. We have a strong team of tutors, and our team offers diverse services, including lab work, project reports, writing services, and presentations.

We often got queries like what is the importance of assignments to students. Likewise, if you have something similar in mind regarding your assignment & homework, comment below. We will answer you. In conclusion, we would like to remind you that if you want to know how our services help achieve academic success, search www.tutorbin.com . Our executive will get back to you shortly with their expert recommendations. 

• E- Learning
• Online Learning

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked*

Comment * NEXT

Save my name and email in this browser for the next time I comment.

You May Also Like

50 Science Research Topics to Write an A+ Paper

What is Java?- Learn From Subject Experts

How to Write an Essay Proposal – Ultimate Guide with Examples

How to Write a Survey Paper: Guidance From Experts

Best 25 Macroeconomics Research Paper Topics in 2024

Online homework help, get homework help.

Get Answer within 15-30 minutes

Check out our free tool Math Problem Solver

About tutorbin, what do we do.

We offer an array of online homework help and other services for our students and tutors to choose from based on their needs and expertise. As an integrated platform for both tutors and students, we provide real time sessions, online assignment and homework help and project work assistance.

Who are we?

TutorBin is an integrated online homework help and tutoring platform serving as a one stop solution for students and online tutors. Students benefit from the experience and domain knowledge of global subject matter experts.

• Columbia University in the City of New York
• Office of Teaching, Learning, and Innovation
• University Policies
• Columbia Online
• Academic Calendar
• Resources and Technology
• Instructional Technologies
• Teaching in All Modalities

Designing Assignments for Learning

The rapid shift to remote teaching and learning meant that many instructors reimagined their assessment practices. Whether adapting existing assignments or creatively designing new opportunities for their students to learn, instructors focused on helping students make meaning and demonstrate their learning outside of the traditional, face-to-face classroom setting. This resource distills the elements of assignment design that are important to carry forward as we continue to seek better ways of assessing learning and build on our innovative assignment designs.

On this page:

Rethinking traditional tests, quizzes, and exams.

• Examples from the Columbia University Classroom
• Tips for Designing Assignments for Learning

Reflect On Your Assignment Design

Connect with the ctl.

• Resources and References

Cite this resource: Columbia Center for Teaching and Learning (2021). Designing Assignments for Learning. Columbia University. Retrieved [today’s date] from https://ctl.columbia.edu/resources-and-technology/teaching-with-technology/teaching-online/designing-assignments/

Traditional assessments tend to reveal whether students can recognize, recall, or replicate what was learned out of context, and tend to focus on students providing correct responses (Wiggins, 1990). In contrast, authentic assignments, which are course assessments, engage students in higher order thinking, as they grapple with real or simulated challenges that help them prepare for their professional lives, and draw on the course knowledge learned and the skills acquired to create justifiable answers, performances or products (Wiggins, 1990). An authentic assessment provides opportunities for students to practice, consult resources, learn from feedback, and refine their performances and products accordingly (Wiggins 1990, 1998, 2014). 

Authentic assignments ask students to “do” the subject with an audience in mind and apply their learning in a new situation. Examples of authentic assignments include asking students to: 

• Write for a real audience (e.g., a memo, a policy brief, letter to the editor, a grant proposal, reports, building a website) and/or publication;
• Solve problem sets that have real world application; 
• Design projects that address a real world problem; 
• Engage in a community-partnered research project;
• Create an exhibit, performance, or conference presentation ;
• Compile and reflect on their work through a portfolio/e-portfolio.

Noteworthy elements of authentic designs are that instructors scaffold the assignment, and play an active role in preparing students for the tasks assigned, while students are intentionally asked to reflect on the process and product of their work thus building their metacognitive skills (Herrington and Oliver, 2000; Ashford-Rowe, Herrington and Brown, 2013; Frey, Schmitt, and Allen, 2012). 

It’s worth noting here that authentic assessments can initially be time consuming to design, implement, and grade. They are critiqued for being challenging to use across course contexts and for grading reliability issues (Maclellan, 2004). Despite these challenges, authentic assessments are recognized as beneficial to student learning (Svinicki, 2004) as they are learner-centered (Weimer, 2013), promote academic integrity (McLaughlin, L. and Ricevuto, 2021; Sotiriadou et al., 2019; Schroeder, 2021) and motivate students to learn (Ambrose et al., 2010). The Columbia Center for Teaching and Learning is always available to consult with faculty who are considering authentic assessment designs and to discuss challenges and affordances.   

Examples from the Columbia University Classroom 

Columbia instructors have experimented with alternative ways of assessing student learning from oral exams to technology-enhanced assignments. Below are a few examples of authentic assignments in various teaching contexts across Columbia University. 

• E-portfolios: Statia Cook shares her experiences with an ePorfolio assignment in her co-taught Frontiers of Science course (a submission to the Voices of Hybrid and Online Teaching and Learning initiative); CUIMC use of ePortfolios ;
• Case studies: Columbia instructors have engaged their students in authentic ways through case studies drawing on the Case Consortium at Columbia University. Read and watch a faculty spotlight to learn how Professor Mary Ann Price uses the case method to place pre-med students in real-life scenarios;
• Simulations: students at CUIMC engage in simulations to develop their professional skills in The Mary & Michael Jaharis Simulation Center in the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and the Helene Fuld Health Trust Simulation Center in the Columbia School of Nursing; 
• Experiential learning: instructors have drawn on New York City as a learning laboratory such as Barnard’s NYC as Lab webpage which highlights courses that engage students in NYC;
• Design projects that address real world problems: Yevgeniy Yesilevskiy on the Engineering design projects completed using lab kits during remote learning. Watch Dr. Yesilevskiy talk about his teaching and read the Columbia News article . 
• Writing assignments: Lia Marshall and her teaching associate Aparna Balasundaram reflect on their “non-disposable or renewable assignments” to prepare social work students for their professional lives as they write for a real audience; and Hannah Weaver spoke about a sandbox assignment used in her Core Literature Humanities course at the 2021 Celebration of Teaching and Learning Symposium . Watch Dr. Weaver share her experiences.  

​Tips for Designing Assignments for Learning

While designing an effective authentic assignment may seem like a daunting task, the following tips can be used as a starting point. See the Resources section for frameworks and tools that may be useful in this effort.  

Align the assignment with your course learning objectives 

Identify the kind of thinking that is important in your course, the knowledge students will apply, and the skills they will practice using through the assignment. What kind of thinking will students be asked to do for the assignment? What will students learn by completing this assignment? How will the assignment help students achieve the desired course learning outcomes? For more information on course learning objectives, see the CTL’s Course Design Essentials self-paced course and watch the video on Articulating Learning Objectives .  

Identify an authentic meaning-making task

For meaning-making to occur, students need to understand the relevance of the assignment to the course and beyond (Ambrose et al., 2010). To Bean (2011) a “meaning-making” or “meaning-constructing” task has two dimensions: 1) it presents students with an authentic disciplinary problem or asks students to formulate their own problems, both of which engage them in active critical thinking, and 2) the problem is placed in “a context that gives students a role or purpose, a targeted audience, and a genre.” (Bean, 2011: 97-98). 

An authentic task gives students a realistic challenge to grapple with, a role to take on that allows them to “rehearse for the complex ambiguities” of life, provides resources and supports to draw on, and requires students to justify their work and the process they used to inform their solution (Wiggins, 1990). Note that if students find an assignment interesting or relevant, they will see value in completing it. 

Consider the kind of activities in the real world that use the knowledge and skills that are the focus of your course. How is this knowledge and these skills applied to answer real-world questions to solve real-world problems? (Herrington et al., 2010: 22). What do professionals or academics in your discipline do on a regular basis? What does it mean to think like a biologist, statistician, historian, social scientist? How might your assignment ask students to draw on current events, issues, or problems that relate to the course and are of interest to them? How might your assignment tap into student motivation and engage them in the kinds of thinking they can apply to better understand the world around them? (Ambrose et al., 2010). 

Determine the evaluation criteria and create a rubric

To ensure equitable and consistent grading of assignments across students, make transparent the criteria you will use to evaluate student work. The criteria should focus on the knowledge and skills that are central to the assignment. Build on the criteria identified, create a rubric that makes explicit the expectations of deliverables and share this rubric with your students so they can use it as they work on the assignment. For more information on rubrics, see the CTL’s resource Incorporating Rubrics into Your Grading and Feedback Practices , and explore the Association of American Colleges & Universities VALUE Rubrics (Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education). 

Build in metacognition

Ask students to reflect on what and how they learned from the assignment. Help students uncover personal relevance of the assignment, find intrinsic value in their work, and deepen their motivation by asking them to reflect on their process and their assignment deliverable. Sample prompts might include: what did you learn from this assignment? How might you draw on the knowledge and skills you used on this assignment in the future? See Ambrose et al., 2010 for more strategies that support motivation and the CTL’s resource on Metacognition ). 

Provide students with opportunities to practice

Design your assignment to be a learning experience and prepare students for success on the assignment. If students can reasonably expect to be successful on an assignment when they put in the required effort ,with the support and guidance of the instructor, they are more likely to engage in the behaviors necessary for learning (Ambrose et al., 2010). Ensure student success by actively teaching the knowledge and skills of the course (e.g., how to problem solve, how to write for a particular audience), modeling the desired thinking, and creating learning activities that build up to a graded assignment. Provide opportunities for students to practice using the knowledge and skills they will need for the assignment, whether through low-stakes in-class activities or homework activities that include opportunities to receive and incorporate formative feedback. For more information on providing feedback, see the CTL resource Feedback for Learning . 

Communicate about the assignment 

Share the purpose, task, audience, expectations, and criteria for the assignment. Students may have expectations about assessments and how they will be graded that is informed by their prior experiences completing high-stakes assessments, so be transparent. Tell your students why you are asking them to do this assignment, what skills they will be using, how it aligns with the course learning outcomes, and why it is relevant to their learning and their professional lives (i.e., how practitioners / professionals use the knowledge and skills in your course in real world contexts and for what purposes). Finally, verify that students understand what they need to do to complete the assignment. This can be done by asking students to respond to poll questions about different parts of the assignment, a “scavenger hunt” of the assignment instructions–giving students questions to answer about the assignment and having them work in small groups to answer the questions, or by having students share back what they think is expected of them.

Plan to iterate and to keep the focus on learning 

Draw on multiple sources of data to help make decisions about what changes are needed to the assignment, the assignment instructions, and/or rubric to ensure that it contributes to student learning. Explore assignment performance data. As Deandra Little reminds us: “a really good assignment, which is a really good assessment, also teaches you something or tells the instructor something. As much as it tells you what students are learning, it’s also telling you what they aren’t learning.” ( Teaching in Higher Ed podcast episode 337 ). Assignment bottlenecks–where students get stuck or struggle–can be good indicators that students need further support or opportunities to practice prior to completing an assignment. This awareness can inform teaching decisions. 

Triangulate the performance data by collecting student feedback, and noting your own reflections about what worked well and what did not. Revise the assignment instructions, rubric, and teaching practices accordingly. Consider how you might better align your assignment with your course objectives and/or provide more opportunities for students to practice using the knowledge and skills that they will rely on for the assignment. Additionally, keep in mind societal, disciplinary, and technological changes as you tweak your assignments for future use. 

Now is a great time to reflect on your practices and experiences with assignment design and think critically about your approach. Take a closer look at an existing assignment. Questions to consider include: What is this assignment meant to do? What purpose does it serve? Why do you ask students to do this assignment? How are they prepared to complete the assignment? Does the assignment assess the kind of learning that you really want? What would help students learn from this assignment? 

Using the tips in the previous section: How can the assignment be tweaked to be more authentic and meaningful to students? 

As you plan forward for post-pandemic teaching and reflect on your practices and reimagine your course design, you may find the following CTL resources helpful: Reflecting On Your Experiences with Remote Teaching , Transition to In-Person Teaching , and Course Design Support .

The Columbia Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) is here to help!

For assistance with assignment design, rubric design, or any other teaching and learning need, please request a consultation by emailing [email protected] . 

Transparency in Learning and Teaching (TILT) framework for assignments. The TILT Examples and Resources page ( https://tilthighered.com/tiltexamplesandresources ) includes example assignments from across disciplines, as well as a transparent assignment template and a checklist for designing transparent assignments . Each emphasizes the importance of articulating to students the purpose of the assignment or activity, the what and how of the task, and specifying the criteria that will be used to assess students. 

Association of American Colleges & Universities (AAC&U) offers VALUE ADD (Assignment Design and Diagnostic) tools ( https://www.aacu.org/value-add-tools ) to help with the creation of clear and effective assignments that align with the desired learning outcomes and associated VALUE rubrics (Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education). VALUE ADD encourages instructors to explicitly state assignment information such as the purpose of the assignment, what skills students will be using, how it aligns with course learning outcomes, the assignment type, the audience and context for the assignment, clear evaluation criteria, desired formatting, and expectations for completion whether individual or in a group.

Villarroel et al. (2017) propose a blueprint for building authentic assessments which includes four steps: 1) consider the workplace context, 2) design the authentic assessment; 3) learn and apply standards for judgement; and 4) give feedback. 

References 

Ambrose, S. A., Bridges, M. W., & DiPietro, M. (2010). Chapter 3: What Factors Motivate Students to Learn? In How Learning Works: Seven Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching . Jossey-Bass. 

Ashford-Rowe, K., Herrington, J., and Brown, C. (2013). Establishing the critical elements that determine authentic assessment. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education. 39(2), 205-222, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2013.819566 .  

Bean, J.C. (2011). Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom . Second Edition. Jossey-Bass. 

Frey, B. B, Schmitt, V. L., and Allen, J. P. (2012). Defining Authentic Classroom Assessment. Practical Assessment, Research, and Evaluation. 17(2). DOI: https://doi.org/10.7275/sxbs-0829  

Herrington, J., Reeves, T. C., and Oliver, R. (2010). A Guide to Authentic e-Learning . Routledge. 

Herrington, J. and Oliver, R. (2000). An instructional design framework for authentic learning environments. Educational Technology Research and Development, 48(3), 23-48. 

Litchfield, B. C. and Dempsey, J. V. (2015). Authentic Assessment of Knowledge, Skills, and Attitudes. New Directions for Teaching and Learning. 142 (Summer 2015), 65-80. 

Maclellan, E. (2004). How convincing is alternative assessment for use in higher education. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education. 29(3), June 2004. DOI: 10.1080/0260293042000188267

McLaughlin, L. and Ricevuto, J. (2021). Assessments in a Virtual Environment: You Won’t Need that Lockdown Browser! Faculty Focus. June 2, 2021. 

Mueller, J. (2005). The Authentic Assessment Toolbox: Enhancing Student Learning through Online Faculty Development . MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Teaching. 1(1). July 2005. Mueller’s Authentic Assessment Toolbox is available online. 

Schroeder, R. (2021). Vaccinate Against Cheating With Authentic Assessment . Inside Higher Ed. (February 26, 2021).  

Sotiriadou, P., Logan, D., Daly, A., and Guest, R. (2019). The role of authentic assessment to preserve academic integrity and promote skills development and employability. Studies in Higher Education. 45(111), 2132-2148. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2019.1582015    

Stachowiak, B. (Host). (November 25, 2020). Authentic Assignments with Deandra Little. (Episode 337). In Teaching in Higher Ed . https://teachinginhighered.com/podcast/authentic-assignments/  

Svinicki, M. D. (2004). Authentic Assessment: Testing in Reality. New Directions for Teaching and Learning. 100 (Winter 2004): 23-29. 

Villarroel, V., Bloxham, S, Bruna, D., Bruna, C., and Herrera-Seda, C. (2017). Authentic assessment: creating a blueprint for course design. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education. 43(5), 840-854. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2017.1412396    

Weimer, M. (2013). Learner-Centered Teaching: Five Key Changes to Practice . Second Edition. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. 

Wiggins, G. (2014). Authenticity in assessment, (re-)defined and explained. Retrieved from https://grantwiggins.wordpress.com/2014/01/26/authenticity-in-assessment-re-defined-and-explained/

Wiggins, G. (1998). Teaching to the (Authentic) Test. Educational Leadership . April 1989. 41-47. 

Wiggins, Grant (1990). The Case for Authentic Assessment . Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation , 2(2). 

Wondering how AI tools might play a role in your course assignments?

See the CTL’s resource “Considerations for AI Tools in the Classroom.”

This website uses cookies to identify users, improve the user experience and requires cookies to work. By continuing to use this website, you consent to Columbia University's use of cookies and similar technologies, in accordance with the Columbia University Website Cookie Notice .

• MyU : For Students, Faculty, and Staff
• Academic Leaders
• Faculty and Instructors
• Graduate Students and Postdocs

Center for Educational Innovation

Request a consultation

• Campus and Collegiate Liaisons
• Pedagogical Innovations Journal Club
• Teaching Enrichment Series
• Recorded Webinars
• Video Series
• All Services
• Teaching Consultations
• Student Feedback Facilitation
• Instructional Media Production
• Curricular and Educational Initiative Consultations
• Educational Research and Evaluation
• Thank a Teacher
• All Teaching Resources
• Teaching with GenAI
• Active Learning
• Aligned Course Design
• Team Projects
• Active Learning Classrooms
• Leveraging the Learning Sciences
• Inclusive Teaching at a Predominantly White Institution
• Strategies to Support Challenging Conversations in the Classroom
• Assessments
• Online Teaching and Design
• Documenting Growth in Teaching
• Early Term Feedback
• Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
• Writing Your Teaching Philosophy
• All Programs
• Assessment Deep Dive
• Designing and Delivering Online Learning
• Early Career Teaching and Learning Program
• International Teaching Assistant (ITA) Program
• Preparing Future Faculty Program
• Teaching with Access and Inclusion Program
• "Teaching with AI" Book Club
• Teaching for Student Well-Being Program
• Teaching Assistant and Postdoc Professional Development Program

Pedagogy - Diversifying Your Teaching Methods, Learning Activities, and Assignments

Definition of Pedagogy 

In the most general sense, pedagogy is all the ways that instructors and students work with the course content. The fundamental learning goal for students is to be able to do “something meaningful” with the course content. Meaningful learning typically results in students working in the middle to upper levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy . We sometimes find that novice instructors conflate course content with pedagogy. This often results in “teaching as talking” where the presentation of content by the instructor is confused with the learning of content by the students. Think of your course content as clay and pedagogy as the ways you ask students to make “something meaningful” from that clay. Pedagogy is the combination of teaching methods (what instructors do), learning activities (what instructors ask their students to do), and learning assessments (the assignments, projects, or tasks that measure student learning).

Key Idea for Pedagogy

Diversify your pedagogy by varying your teaching methods, learning activities, and assignments. Critically assess your pedagogy through the lens of BIPOC students’ experiences at a PWI . We visualize these two related practices as a cycle because they are iterative and ongoing. Diversifying your pedagogy likely means shedding some typical ways of teaching in your discipline, or the teaching practices you inherited. It likely means doing more active learning and less traditional lecturing. Transforming good pedagogy into equitable pedagogy means rethinking your pedagogy in light of the PWI context and considering the ways your pedagogy may help or hinder learning for BIPOC students. 

PWI Assumptions for Pedagogy

Understanding where students are on the spectrum of novice to expert learning in your discipline or course is a key challenge to implementing effective and inclusive pedagogy (National Research Council 2000). Instructors are typically so far removed from being a novice learner in their disciplines that they struggle to understand where students are on that spectrum. A key PWI assumption is that students understand how your disciplinary knowledge is organized and constructed . Students typically do not understand your discipline or the many other disciplines they are working in during their undergraduate years. Even graduate students may find it puzzling to explain the origins, methodologies, theories, logics, and assumptions of their disciplines. A second PWI assumption is that students are (or should be) academically prepared to learn your discipline . Students may be academically prepared for learning in some disciplines, but unless their high school experience was college preparatory and well supported, students (especially first-generation college students) are likely finding their way through a mysterious journey of different disciplinary conventions and modes of working and thinking (Nelson 1996).

A third PWI assumption is that instructors may confuse students’ academic underpreparation with their intelligence or capacity to learn . Academic preparation is typically a function of one’s high school experience including whether that high school was well resourced or under funded. Whether or not a student receives a quality high school education is usually a structural matter reflecting inequities in our K12 educational systems, not a reflection of an individual student’s ability to learn. A final PWI assumption is that students will learn well in the ways that the instructor learned well . Actually most instructors in higher education self-selected into disciplines that align with their interests, skills, academic preparation, and possibly family and community support. Our students have broader and different goals for seeking a college education and bring a range of skills to their coursework, which may or may not align with instructors’ expectations of how students learn. Inclusive teaching at a PWI means supporting the learning and career goals of our students.

Pedagogical Content Knowledge as a Core Concept

Kind and Chan (2019) propose that Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) is the synthesis of Content Knowledge (expertise about a subject area) and Pedagogical Knowledge (expertise about teaching methods, assessment, classroom management, and how students learn). Content Knowledge (CK) without Pedagogical Knowledge (PK) limits instructors’ ability to teach effectively or inclusively. Novice instructors that rely on traditional lectures likely have limited Pedagogical Knowledge and may also be replicating their own inherited teaching practices. While Kind and Chan (2019) are writing from the perspective of science education, their concepts apply across disciplines. Moreover, Kind and Chan (2019) support van Driel et al.’s assertion that:

high-quality PCK is not characterized by knowing as many strategies as possible to teach a certain topic plus all the misconceptions students may have about it but by knowing when to apply a certain strategy in recognition of students’ actual learning needs and understanding why a certain teaching approach may be useful in one situation (quoted in Kind and Chan 2019, 975). 

As we’ve stressed throughout this guide, the teaching context matters, and for inclusive pedagogy, special attention should be paid to the learning goals, instructor preparation, and students’ point of entry into course content. We also argue that the PWI context shapes what instructors might practice as CK, PK, and PCK. We recommend instructors become familiar with evidence-based pedagogy (or the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning , SoTL) in their fields. Moreover, we advise instructors to find and follow those instructors and scholars that specifically focus on inclusive teaching in their fields in order to develop an inclusive, flexible, and discipline-specific Pedagogical Content Knowledge.

Suggested Practices for Diversifying + Assessing Pedagogy

Although diversifying and critically assessing teaching methods, learning activities, and assignments will vary across disciplines, we offer a few key starting points. Diversifying your pedagogy is easier than critically assessing it through a PWI lens, but both steps are essential. In general, you can diversify your pedagogy by learning about active learning, peer learning, team-based learning, experiential learning, problem-based learning, and case-based learning, among others . There is extensive evidence-based pedagogical literature and practical guides readily available for these methods. And you can also find and follow scholars in your discipline that use these and other teaching methods.

Diversifying Your Pedagogy

Convert traditional lectures into interactive (or active) lectures.

For in-person or synchronous online courses, break a traditional lecture into “mini-lectures” of 10-15 minutes in length. After each mini-lecture, ask your students to process their learning using a discussion or problem prompt, a Classroom Assessment Technique (CAT), a Think-Pair-Share, or another brief learning activity. Read Lecturing from Center for Teaching , Vanderbilt University.

Structure small group discussions

Provide both a process and concrete questions or tasks to guide student learning (for example, provide a scenario with 3 focused tasks such as identify the problem, brainstorm possible solutions, and list the pros/cons for each solution). Read How to Hold a Better Class Discussion , The Chronicle of Higher Education .

Integrate active learning

Integrate active learning, especially into courses that are conceptual, theoretical, or otherwise historically challenging (for example, calculus, organic chemistry, statistics, philosophy). For gateway courses, draw upon the research of STEM and other education specialists on how active learning and peer learning improves student learning and reduces disparities. Read the Association of American Universities STEM Network Scholarship .  

Include authentic learning

Include authentic learning, learning activities and assignments that mirror how students will work after graduation. What does it mean to think and work like an engineer? How do project teams work together? How does one present research in an educational social media campaign? Since most students seeking a college education will not become academic researchers or faculty, what kinds of things will they do in the “real world?” Help students practice and hone those skills as they learn the course content. Read Edutopia’s PBL: What Does It Take for a Project to Be Authentic?

Vary assignments and provide options

Graded assignments should range from low to high stakes. Low stakes assignments allow students to learn from their mistakes and receive timely feedback on their learning. Options for assignments allow students to demonstrate their learning, rather than demonstrate their skill at a particular type of assessment (such as a multiple choice exam or an academic research paper). Read our guide, Create Assessments That Promote Learning for All Students .

Critically Assess Your Pedagogy

Critically assessing your pedagogy through the PWI lens with attention to how your pedagogy may affect the learning of BIPOC students is more challenging and highly contextual. Instructors will want to review and apply the concepts and principles discussed in the earlier sections of this guide on Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs), PWI Assumptions, and Class Climate. 

Reflect on patterns

Reflect on patterns of participation, progress in learning (grade distributions), and other course-related evidence. Look at your class sessions and assignments as experimental data. Who participated? What kinds of participation did you observe? Who didn’t participate? Why might that be? Are there a variety of ways for students to participate in the learning activities (individually, in groups, via discussion, via writing, synchronously/in-person, asynchronously/online)?

Respond to feedback on climate

Respond to feedback on climate from on-going check-ins and Critical Incident Questionnaires (CIQs) as discussed in the Climate Section (Ongoing Practices). Students will likely disengage from your requests for feedback if you do not respond to their feedback. Use this feedback to re-calibrate and re-think your pedagogy. 

Seek feedback on student learning

Seek feedback on student learning in the form of Classroom Assessment Techniques (CATs), in-class polls, asynchronous forums, exam wrappers, and other methods.  Demonstrate that you care about your students’ learning by responding to this feedback as well. Here’s how students in previous semesters learned this material … I’m scheduling a problem-solving review session in the next class in response to the results of the exam …

Be diplomatic but clear when correcting mistakes and misconceptions

First-generation college students, many of whom may also identify as BIPOC, have typically achieved a great deal with few resources and significant barriers (Yosso 2005). However, they may be more likely to internalize their learning mistakes as signs that they don’t belong at the university. When correcting, be sure to normalize mistakes as part of the learning process. The correct answer is X, but I can see why you thought it was Y. Many students think it is Y because … But the correct answer is X because … Thank you for helping us understand that misconception.

Allow time for students to think and prepare for participation in a non-stressful setting

This was already suggested in the Climate Section (Race Stressors), but it is worth repeating. BIPOC students and multilingual students may need more time to prepare, not because of their intellectual abilities, but because of the effects of race stressors and other stressors increasing their cognitive load. Providing discussion or problem prompts in advance will reduce this stress and make space for learning. Additionally both student populations may experience stereotype threat, so participation in the “public” aspects of the class session may be stressful in ways that are not true for the majority white and domestic students. If you cannot provide prompts in advance, be sure to allow ample individual “think time” during a synchronous class session.

Avoid consensus models or majority rules processes

This was stated in the Climate Section (Teaching Practices to Avoid), but it’s such an entrenched PWI practice that it needs to be spotlighted and challenged. If I am a numerical “minority” and I am asked to come to consensus or agreement with a numerical “majority,” it is highly likely that my perspective will be minimized or dismissed. Or, I will have to expend a lot of energy to persuade my group of the value of my perspective, which is highly stressful. This is an unacceptable burden to put on BIPOC students and also may result in BIPOC students being placed in the position of teaching white students about a particular perspective or experience. The resulting tensions may also damage BIPOC students’ positive relationships with white students and instructors. When suitable for your content, create a learning experience that promotes seeking multiple solutions to problems, cases, or prompts. Rather than asking students to converge on one best recommendation, why not ask students to log all possible solutions (without evaluation) and then to recommend at least two solutions that include a rationale? Moreover, for course content dealing with policies, the recommended solutions could be explained in terms of their possible effects on different communities. If we value diverse perspectives, we need to structure the consideration of those perspectives into our learning activities and assignments. 

We recognize the challenges of assessing your pedagogy through the PWI lens and doing your best to assess the effects on BIPOC student learning. This is a complex undertaking. But we encourage you to invite feedback from your students as well as to seek the guidance of colleagues, including advisors and other student affairs professionals, to inform your ongoing practices of teaching inclusively at a PWI. In the next section, we complete our exploration of the Inclusive Teaching at a PWI Framework by exploring the importance of auditing, diversifying, and critically assessing course content.

Pedagogy References

Kind, Vanessa and Kennedy K.H. Chan. 2019. “Resolving the Amalgam: Connecting Pedagogical Content Knowledge, Content Knowledge and Pedagogical Knowledge.” International Journal of Science Education . 41(7): 964-978.

Howard, Jay. N.D. “How to Hold a Better Class Discussion: Advice Guide.” The Chronicle of Higher Education . https://www.chronicle.com/article/how-to-hold-a-better-class-discussion/#2 

National Research Council. 2000. “How Experts Differ from Novices.” Chap 2 in How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School: Expanded Edition . Washington D.C.: The National Academies Press. https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/9853/how-people-learn-brain-mind-experience-and-school-expanded-edition

Nelson, Craig E. 1996. “Student Diversity Requires Different Approaches to College Teaching, Even in Math and Science.” The American Behavioral Scientist . 40 (2): 165-175.

Sathy, Viji and Kelly A. Hogan. N.D.  “How to Make Your Teaching More Inclusive: Advice Guide.” The Chronicle of Higher Education . https://www.chronicle.com/article/how-to-make-your-teaching-more-inclusive/?cid=gen_sign_in

Yosso, Tara J. 2005. “Whose Culture Has Capital? A Critical Race Theory Discussion of Community Cultural Wealth.” Race, Ethnicity and Education . 8 (1): 69-91.

• Caroline Hilk
• Why Use Active Learning?
• Successful Active Learning Implementation
• Addressing Active Learning Challenges
• Research and Resources
• Why Use Team Projects?
• Project Description Examples
• Project Description for Students
• Team Projects and Student Development Outcomes
• Forming Teams
• Team Output
• Individual Contributions to the Team
• Individual Student Understanding
• Supporting Students
• Wrapping up the Project
• Addressing Challenges
• Course Planning
• Working memory
• Retrieval of information
• Spaced practice
• Active learning
• Metacognition
• Definitions and PWI Focus
• A Flexible Framework
• Class Climate
• Course Content
• An Ongoing Endeavor
• Learn About Your Context
• Design Your Course to Support Challenging Conversations
• Design Your Challenging Conversations Class Session
• Use Effective Facilitation Strategies
• What to Do in a Challenging Moment
• Debrief and Reflect On Your Experience, and Try, Try Again
• Supplemental Resources
• Align Assessments
• Multiple Low Stakes Assessments
• Authentic Assessments
• Formative and Summative Assessments
• Varied Forms of Assessments
• Cumulative Assessments
• Equitable Assessments
• Essay Exams
• Multiple Choice Exams and Quizzes
• Academic Paper
• Skill Observation
• Alternative Assessments
• Assessment Plan
• Grade Assessments
• Prepare Students
• Reduce Student Anxiety
• SRT Scores: Interpreting & Responding
• Student Feedback Question Prompts
• Research Questions and Design
• Gathering data
• Publication
• GRAD 8101: Teaching in Higher Education
• Finding a Practicum Mentor
• GRAD 8200: Teaching for Learning
• Proficiency Rating & TA Eligibility
• Schedule a SETTA
• TAPD Webinars

• About OER Africa
• Our Resources and Publications
• Articles and Updates
• The role of assignments in supporting learning
• Supporting Distance Learners
• Unit 6: Assignments to Support the Learning Process

Assignments as a focus for what is important to learn

T ake a moment to reflect on your own experience of learning in a formal course. At what point in the process did you start asking questions about the way in which you would be assessed? When did you first sit down to read the assignment descriptions in your course outline, or ask your teacher what would be required of you in the assignments?   

If you are like most learners, this was probably something you did fairly early on in the course. And as a result, if you are like most learners, your understanding of what you would be assessed on, and how you would be assessed, probably helped you decide what to focus on as you progressed through the course. It probably also helped you decide what to ignore.

Assignments help learners to focus on the essential learning and not to get swamped by details. Being transparent about the exact requirements of assignments from the start of the course is an important way in which you can support your learners in managing their time.

Assignments are also an opportunity for the tutor to provide individual feedback to learners. Your feedback will help learners to gauge their progress throughout the course, and can play a critical role in either motivating or demotivating learners as they continue with their studies.

A third role that assignments can play is in helping you evaluate what is working on your course and what aspects need improvement. If large numbers of your learners struggle with a particular assignment, or a particular aspect of an assignment, that is possibly an indication that you need to revisit the relevant section of the course and build in more support for learners. It could also be an indication that the assignment itself needs to be revised.

Assignments as scaffolding

Assignments, more than any other component of an online course, create the scaffolding that enables learning to occur. (Have a look at the section on constructivism in Unit 3 if you need a brief reminder of the concept of scaffolding.)

A thoughtfully constructed assignment can take the learner on an exhilarating journey into unknown territory, all the while providing signposts and pit stops exactly where they are needed. At the end, the learner should be able to look back in pride and say, 'Wow! I did that!' Each successfully completed assignment should contribute to the learner’s growing sense of confidence in himself as a professional in the field in which he is studying. The assignments themselves acted as the scaffolding for the learning to occur.

Here are some ways in which you can create assignments as scaffolding:

• If possible, try designing the whole course around a series of assignments, each one building on the last. If learners can see that Assignment 1 helps them to get to grips with the concepts that will be applied in Assignment 2, they are likely to put a great deal of effort into Assignment 1. (In this scenario, it is even more critical than ever to provide learners with prompt feedback on their assignments, so that they can clarify any misunderstandings before they embark on the next assignment.) 
• Create staged assignments. Each stage has to be completed before the next one can be started, and there is some form of feedback – either from other learners, or from you – at the end of each stage to help learners judge their own progress towards the expected outcomes. 
• Build in a requirement that learners have to collaborate on some part of the assignment. This is surprisingly easy to do using online communication tools, such as discussion forums and wikis. These tools allow learners to participate at times that suit them over an extended period, and provide a permanent record, for the learners and for you, of the communication, for later reference. This idea is elaborated on in the next section.
• H ow do you approach assignments in the distance course(s) you teach? Do you use any of the approaches described above – i.e. a series of assignments all building on one another; staged assignments; and/or a requirement of collaboration on some part of the assignment? If so, can you give examples of how your assignments provide scaffolding for learners in your particular discipline?
• Perhaps you're a tutor on a course where someone else designs the assignments. But nevertheless, which of the suggestions given above could you use to support the learners to complete their assignments well?

Why Should You Use Writing Assignments in Your Teaching?

Brad hughes, director, writing across the curriculum, university of wisconsin-madison.

Why should you use writing assignments in your teaching? That’s an important question. Even though this is a Writing Across the Curriculum website, designed to encourage faculty to incorporate writing into their teaching, let’s be honest—there are many reasons why you might not want to assign writing in your courses. And many of those reasons have to do with limits on your time. Designing writing assignments and responding to student writing take valuable time—lots of time if you do them carefully. The larger the enrollment is in your classes, the more time responding to student papers takes. You have lots of important course content to cover, so you have limited time for building in a sequence of writing assignments and some instruction around those assignments. . . .

You also need to remember that writing assignments  take substantial time for your students to do well. And not all of your students are well prepared to succeed with the writing you assign. This list could go on; the challenges can be formidable.

Yet countless faculty—in every discipline across the university—make writing an integral part of their teaching and reap benefits from doing so. Why? Here are some of the many reasons writing is an especially effective means for students to learn.

• Writing deepens thinking and increases students’ engagement with course material.
• Well-designed writing assignments prompt students to think more deeply about what they’re learning. Writing a book review, for example, forces students to read more thoroughly and critically. As an old saying goes, “How do I know what I think until I hear what I say or see what I’ve written?”
• In fact, research done by Richard Light at Harvard confirms that “students relate writing to intensity of courses. The relationship between the amount of writing for a course and students’ level of engagement—whether engagement is measured by time spent on the course, or the intellectual challenge it presents, or students’ self-reported level of interest in it—is stronger than any relationship we found between student engagement and any other course characteristic” ( The Harvard Assessment Seminars , Second Report, 1992, 25).
• Research done by the Association of American Colleges and Universities demonstrates that writing-intensive courses are a high-impact practice in undergraduate education (George D. Kuh, High-Impact Educational Practices: What They Are, Who Has Access to Them, and Why They Matter , 2008).
• Research done by Michele Eodice, Anne Ellen Geller, and Neal Lerner ( The Meaningful Writing Project , 2017) demonstrates that certain writing projects can be especially meaningful parts of undergraduate education.
• Writing can improve our relationship with our students. When students write papers, we get to know them and their thinking better; they’re more likely to talk with us after class, or come to our office hours to share a draft or seek advice.
• Writing gives us a window into our students’ thinking and learning. Through our students’ writing, we can take pleasure in discovering that students see things in course readings or discussion we didn’t see; students make connections we ourselves hadn’t made. And through our students’ writing, we also discover what confuses our students. Admittedly, we’re not always eager to discover the gaps in our students’ knowledge or understanding, but it’s our job to expand that knowledge and improve students’ thinking.
• Writing assignments can improve our classroom discussions. By helping students keep up with readings, regular writing assignments can prepare students to participate in discussion.
• Writing assignments provide us with an opportunity to teach students to organize ideas, develop points logically, make explicit connections, elaborate ideas, argue points, and situate an argument in the context of previous research-all skills valued in higher education.
• Students remember what they write about-because writing slows thinking down and requires careful, sustained analysis of a subject. No matter how many years it’s been, most of us can remember some paper we wrote as undergraduates, the writing of which deepened our knowledge of a particular subject.
• Students and professors remember what they’ve written, in part, because writing individualizes learning. When a student becomes really engaged with a writing assignment, she has to make countless choices particular to her paper: how to focus the topic, what to read, what to make the central argument, how to organize ideas, how to marshal evidence, which general points to make, how to develop and support general ideas with particulars, how to introduce the topic, what to include and what to omit, which style and tone to adopt. . . .
• Finally, though it’s much more than this, writing is a skill—a skill that atrophies when it isn’t practiced regularly. Because learning to write well is difficult and because it requires sustained and repeated practice, we need to ensure our undergraduates write regularly, throughout the curriculum, in all majors. It’s the responsibility of all of us to ensure that students learn to think and write clearly and deeply.

• Our Mission

Differentiated Instruction Allows Students to Succeed

One of the hardest things for a teacher to do is to treat students differently. It goes against our very nature. We are programmed to treat each child the same as we would treat any other child. No child deserves special privilege, nor does any child deserve less attention -- regardless of race, gender or academic ability.

It grates on our nerves when that know-it-all student who always sits in the front row always demands time to show off. It frustrates us to no end when the student in the back of the class makes rude noises and refuses to stay on task.

Making Decisions

Which students miss out most? It is the student in the middle who doesn't cause problems, who obeys, conforms, and never demands attention. We rarely give her the time of day in our race to take care of the extremes.

I had one of those students in my classroom. He was in my intermediate Spanish class and always sat in the middle. He never said a lot, and he did his work quietly. He wasn't the best in the classroom, and he wasn't the worst. I remember that he did struggle with rolling his rs. One day, he didn't come to class, and we got word that he had committed suicide. Not that I could have done anything to prevent this, but you always have the nagging doubt that perhaps you could have made a difference. In that moment, I vowed to never assume the quiet ones were OK.

Yet even with that, we are pressured to give the students with more needs more attention than those students who have less needs. The largest conflict about differentiated instruction boils up inside of us when we try to assign a grade to that differentiated instruction.

How can we justifiably give the students the same grade when the quality, quantity, or content of the performance is different? I have yet to read a truly compelling argument to answer that question. Most people mumble something about grades being a relative measure of student performance and designed for communication of progress only.

So, this is my attempt to make sense of this dilemma and perhaps calm a few nervous hearts in the process. In my prior post , I discussed the idea of intrinsic differentiation and the role of active learning and active teaching. Now, I want to discuss designed differentiation a bit.

Meeting Students Where They Are

Designed differentiation is the deliberate act of modifying instruction or an assignment in order to customize the effect to match the particular developmental level and skills of a student or group of students. The ideal is to provide equivalent learning activities that cater to the students' strengths but bring all of the students to the same learning objective. On one end of the spectrum is the one-size-fits-all learning activity, while on the other end is the completely individualized learning plan for each student. Although I believe it is time for the latter, realism demands that teachers deal with something that hovers around the middle of the continuum.

The best teachers throughout time have always found ways to reach individual students. Teachers today are no different. We have all sorts of designed differentiation strategies that help teachers offer variety and choice to students of different skills and needs. We can

• vary the length or quantity of the assignment.
• extend or curtail the duration of the assignment.
• change the language of the assignment.
• scaffold the learning activity from hard to medium to easy.
• compact the activity and teach only what they don't know.
• give them learning activities that let them perform the same learning objective with multiple mediums like summarizing a story they have read through narrative, drama, song, poetry, art, or design.

Allow for Do-Overs

There is also a strong movement of simply allowing students to work at their own pace through computer-aided instruction, or SRA -type curriculum. There is one more type of designed differentiation method I believe is underutilized -- the rough draft.

When a student is given a learning assignment to turn in, is it really a learning assignment if they have only one chance at meeting the mastery-level standard? Clearly identified standards of performance are necessary to make this work, but when a student submits a substandard piece of work, rather than assign a grade immediately, we can provide personalized, individual feedback to that student, which includes providing suggestions for improvement and giving it back to the student for revision.

Is there a limit to the number of times this can be done to help a student overcome a particular learning obstacle? Some students might be able to do it right the first time, while others need several revisions. This strategy is the ultimate in designed differentiation.

Typically, we see this kind of opportunity only in English and social studies classes. Why not math and science? After all, if the student eventually gets the concept, isn't that what counts? The thing I like about this approach is that no student is left out -- not even the quiet, no-problem kids.

What are your successes with designed differentiation? What are your challenges? Please share your thoughts.

• Utility Menu

GA4 Tracking Code

Gen ed writes, writing across the disciplines at harvard college, teaching the elements of writing assignments.

Overview: How Unpacking the Elements Translates into Lesson Planning

In Unpacking the Elements we try to break down prompts into the essential features common to nearly every assignment (writing or not), and in doing so the goal was primarily two-fold: to help instructors identify the role of each element in their own assignments and how clearly each element is communicated in their prompts; and to give students and instructors a shared, simple vocabulary for talking about the goals and expectations of assignments.  In this section, the goal is to move from designing effective prompts and sharing them with students to using prompts as a road map for teaching in the classroom. If you’ve done the assignment prompt decoder and thought about elements in a specific prompt, you were maybe left with a few questions. For example:  

• What does it look like to teach each element and give students practice with them?
• What is the best order to teach the elements in?
• How can I scaffold smaller exercises or give students feedback along the way?
• What’s the timing of all of this look like within the framework of a real term?

In the pages of this section we take up these questions, first laying out more generally how teaching through the elements looks in the classroom before taking a deeper dive into a handful of the more common—and increasingly complex—types of academic writing assignments. For each kind of assignment, you’ll find sample timelines and sequences, along with out-of-the-box activities and generalizable advice on teaching with writing (“tips” and “pitfalls to avoid”). 

The advice and examples in this section are meant to be flexible enough to adapt to a wide range of real-life teaching scenarios and pedagogical approaches, but they all reflect a handful of guiding principles about the interrelated ways that assignment prompts "work": they create the context for learning experiences by serving as a touchstone for student-teacher discussions about the specific goals and expectations of the learning experience at hand, and they help keep instructors and students alive to what those goals and expectations are—and how their time together is an ongoing, well-supported engagement with them.

Three Key Principles for Teaching Writing in the Classroom

Students should always be “writing the paper”.

If your lesson plan is drawn from the actual assignment students are working on at any point in the term (whether it’s a smaller “now” response paper or a smaller part of a “bigger” project due in six weeks), then nearly every homework assignment or in-class activity is writing the paper. The purpose of section will always be more clear if students recognize that every meeting is a chance to practice relevant skills or make progress on an assignment. And of course, that recognition is only possible if students understand what the goals of the assignment they're working on are, what skills are relevant to meeting those goals, and what kinds of steps reflect progress toward them. With that in mind, it’s helpful to start with the Assignment Decoder for Students . 

Prompts don’t (and shouldn’t be asked to) speak for themselves

The assignment prompt decoders linked throughout this site are meant to give course heads, TFs & TAs, and students a way of assessing how clearly a prompt is communicating its elements. For course heads and instructors, this might lead to a revision of the prompt or clarifications in class or meetings of the teaching team. For students, it might lead to questions in section, emails to an instructor, or asking a fellow student for input. Whatever doing the decoder leads to—and whether or not the decoder is used at all—it’s crucial to keep in mind that prompts don’t speak for themselves, no matter how clear they are: they’re a framework for, and hopefully an invitation to discussion about what it will look and feel like to do an assignment well. But what about a really clear prompt—doesn’t it save class time if students can just read it on their own? It’s a fair question, and the fair response is that we can’t know whether students have understood the really clear prompt unless we have a discussion with them about it. At that point, of course, we’re back to discussing the prompt, and the upside is this: spending class time working through prompts is actually a reliably efficient way to make subsequent classes more effective. 

You can’t do it all, and you don’t need to

If you and your students are on the same page about the goals and priorities of an assignment, then you’re freed up to engage in some backward design triage: How much time is there until the likely deadline? How many sections are there to work with? What are the essential elements that need teaching and practice? What’s a good place to start? When giving feedback, it’s almost as unhelpful to just write “A-” without comments as it is to fill the margins with comments or append a novella’s worth of reflection to the end of a student’s essay. In both cases, it’s unclear what the rubric for feedback is and how they reflect the priorities of this assignment. And the same goes for teaching this assignment: You should find the sequence of in-class activities and formative assessments that best balance what’s necessary for students to succeed with what’s possible given the time and bandwidth available to you and your students. The general advice and sample trajectories for assignments in this section are meant to make that balance feel both attainable and much more than “good enough”—it’s what great teachers aim for. 

• DIY Guides for Analytical Writing Assignments

• Types of Assignments
• Unpacking the Elements of Writing Prompts
• The Steps of Teaching the Most Common Types of Writing Assignments
• Giving Feedback to Students

Assignment Decoder

Education Essay Samples: Choose Yours to Get A+

What is an essay on education?

It’s a paper that students write in school or college to tell why education is important (1). The rules of structuring and formatting it are standard:

•  Hook readers and introduce a thesis. 
•  Provide arguments and evidence in the body to support your statement. 
•  Write a conclusion restating the thesis and summarizing the body. 

In this article, you’ll find three samples of education essays. All are of different lengths. Choose one that fits your assignment best, and feel free to use it as an example for writing your paper like a boss.

Importance of Education: Essay (250 words)

When asked to write an essay about the importance of education, check this sample for inspiration.

College Essay on Importance of Education (300 words)

A 300-word paper has a more complex structure. You can divide it into three paragraphs. Or, create a five-paragraph story with three parts in a body. It all depends on how you craft a thesis and how many arguments you have.

Bonus: How to Write a 300 Words Essay

500 Word Essay on Why Education Is Important

“Why is education important” essay can be long, too. If you get an assignment to write a 500+ word paper on this topic, here you have a sample to check.

What is education essay?

It is a short academic paper students write in school or college to explain the importance of education to the audience. It has a corresponding thesis statement and requires arguments and evidence to prove its relevance.

What is the purpose of education essay?

The purpose (2) is to explain the role of education and persuade readers of this idea with arguments and evidence.

 When writing, a student can use facts, statistics, and examples to support the arguments. Topics are numerous, but all relate to the idea that education is crucial for young generations and society in general.

How long is an essay on why education is important?

The length varies from 150 to 750 words. It depends on the assignment or how in-depth you intend to go on the topic and structure your academic paper.

Thus, a 150-word paper will be one paragraph, which is prevalent for middle school students. For 500-word essays, the structure is as follows: education essay introduction, body, and conclusion.

The longer your essay, the more structured and in-depth it will be.

Ready to Write Your Essay on Education?

I hope the examples from this article have helped you learn how to write an essay on importance of education. Whatever the length, please structure it accordingly: Follow the rules of academic writing. Use arguments and provide evidence.

An essay on education isn’t that challenging to write. Don’t be afraid to share your thoughts on the topic. Even a controversial idea works if you know how to spark readers with it.

References:

• https://www.uopeople.edu/blog/10-reasons-why-is-education-important/
• https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/purpose-education
• Essay samples
• Essay writing
• Writing tips

Recent Posts

• Writing the “Why Should Abortion Be Made Legal” Essay: Sample and Tips
• 3 Examples of Enduring Issue Essays to Write Yours Like a Pro
• Writing Essay on Friendship: 3 Samples to Get Inspired
• How to Structure a Leadership Essay (Samples to Consider)
• What Is Nursing Essay, and How to Write It Like a Pro

Assessment support

What to consider when using assignments as an assessment method for a course.

An assignment is a piece of (academic) work or task. It provides opportunity for students to learn, practice and demonstrate they have achieved the learning goals. It provides the evidence for the teacher that the students have achieved the goals. The output can be judged using sensory perception (observing, reading, tasting etc.). The assignment can focus on a product as output (e.g. research report, design, prototype, etc.) and/or a process (e.g. research process, group process) and/or the performance of individual skills or competences (e.g. professional skills, communications skills).

When assessing with assignments, we should pay attention to:  >>  validity : we really test what we want to test; the assignment and the way we assess the results are aligned with the learning goals. >> reliability : based on the results, we make a right, just, fair, objective distinction between pass/fail or provide the just grade. Our scoring or grading is done in a consistent way and the  judgments or the grades are meaningful. >> transparency : it clear upfront for the students what they will learn, what they have to do (as evidence; what to deliver or show), how they will be assessed and what to expect during the process. >> the assignment and the feedback provided will support the learning process .  

With the toolbox below, related to the questions and issues mentioned above, we hope to offer you useful tips and guidelines for designing and assessing assignments.

• Top 10 tips on designing assessment tasks with particular focuses on learning outcomes, and assessment criteria. Resource: Learnhigher .   Resource picture: Nick Youngson - link to - http://nyphotographic.com/

• Assessment Criteria . About: characteristics; threshold or marking criteria; hidden criteria.(University of Kent) 
• Know what it is that you are assessing: writing assessment criteria . Things to remember when writing assessment criteria and an example format.(University of Reading) 

Useful resources to learn more about rubrics, to find templates or examples:

• What are rubrics and why are they important?  Explanation about the purpose of rubrics and about different types of rubrics. (ASCD, by Susan M. Brookhart)  
• Introduction to Rubrics . By Danielle Stevens and Antonia Levi from Portland State University. Including templates and examples.
• Grading and Performance Rubrics . Explanation and some very nice examples. Eberly Center.
• More Examples of Rubrics and Other Resources . Examples for specific purposes, like class participation, team work, multidisciplinary work, research papers and more. DePaul university Teaching Commons.    

The disadvantage of assignments is, most of the time, that scoring and grading will take a lot of time. Especially if you want to give the students detailed feedback. The resources below may give you some (new) ideas and tips to assess and provide feedback in an efficient as well as an effective way.      

• Clare Furneaux of the University of Reading (UK) offers her tip for assessing large numbers of students and at the same time provide elaborate feedback. Short video . 
• Stimulate success.  Tips on providing ‘Feed Forward’ guidance  (tips from the University of Reading, UK).  
• Grading Student Papers: Reducing Faculty Workload While Improving Feedback to Students . An article by Kathy Pezdek with tips (e.g. using a coding system).  
• If you are working at the University of Twente and would like some support or just discuss your ideas or plans, please turn to the Technology Enhanced Learning & Teaching group .  
• The Centre for Teaching Excellence of the University of Waterloo developed a usefull webpage about fast and equitable grading. 

• Helping Students to Reflect on their Group Work .  With useful instruments and tips.(UNSW)  
• Methods for Assessing Group Work . A very  worthwhile site about ways to assess group work. With advantages and disadvantages for different methods and formula to provide scores/grades. (University of Waterloo; Centre for Teaching Excellence)   
• Group Work and Group Assessment . Handbook / guidelines and some useful instruments. (Centre for Academic Development; Victoria University of Wellington) 

Academic integrity is important and most students will agree and act accordingly. But nevertheless fraud occurs occasionally and as an examiner you are expected to detect fraud, whether it is real cheating, like delivering work someone else made, or plagiarism or free-riding. But how can you detect it? And what to do next? In case of plagiarism or free-riding, it might not always happen with the wrong intentions or circumstances may have influenced what happened. Better to look for ways to prevent it, but what can be done? Below you will find some useful resources dealing with these issues.   NB. Specific rules and regulations may apply for your educational programme. For the University of Twente you have to check the Educational Examination Rules (EER) for your own educational programme and the  Rules & Regulations of the Examination Board for your programme or faculty. Be aware that you have to report fraud to the Examination Board!

• Top10 tips on deterring plagiarism . (LearnHigher site).This resource includes tips on how to prevent and eradicate the appeal for plagiarism. Ideas for task and assessment design are suggested, with a particular focus on the research process.
• Reduce the risk of plagiarism in just 30 minutes!   Leaflet with tips. (ASKe; Oxford Brookes University)   
• A short note with 10 tips to prevent freeriding . 

This exercise is especially developed for the course Testing & Assessment. This course is offered by the Centre of Expertise in Learning and Teaching (CELT), University of Twente. The course is part of the UTQ (BKO) and UEQ (BKE) trajectory. Copyright  CELT-UT / Expertise team T&A.  The material may be used by other parties provided that reference is made. If you would like us to give a workshop on this subject, either in English or Dutch, face-to-face or online, please contact us: [email protected] 

• Educational Assessment

The Importance of Educational Assessment: Tools and Techniques for Assessing Your Students

• June 23, 2022
• Faculty Focus

In this educational assessment guide, we’ll answer questions such as:

What is the purpose of educational assessment? What are the benefits of assessments? What are the main types of assessment? What is the difference between evaluation and assessment?

Formative assessment can be any assessment that first and foremost promotes students’ learning. Many refer to this type of assessment as assessment “for” learning. In contrast, summative assessment, or assessment “of” learning, looks at grades or scores that give a final judgment or evaluation of proficiency. Assessment “for” learning is usually more informal and includes aspects of teaching. It is formative because it gathers evidence that helps teachers better meet the learning needs of students as well as empowering students to be change agents in their achievement. A host of studies have shown that when formative assessment is implemented effectively, it can greatly enhance, or even double, the speed of student learning. This guide provides specific examples of educational assessment tools, why assessment is important in gauging student comprehension, and how you can implement assessment techniques into your own course.

The importance of educational assessment

Educational assessment is one of the most talked about topics in higher education today. Despite the admirable goal of improving student learning, the trend toward greater accountability through increased academic testing carries with it a diverse range of educational assessment tools, methodologies, perspectives, and stakeholders.

If today’s mandates for educational testing has you searching for answers, take a dive into the following articles and products that cover topics such as forms of assessment, cognitive demand levels, formative and summative assessments, alternative assessment methods, and evaluative assessment.

Free articles

• Assessment for Learning: It Just Makes Sense
• Four Reasons Assessment Doesn’t Work and What We Can Do About It
• Re-envisioning Online Course Revision
• Educational Assessment: A Different Kind of Feedback

Teaching Professor articles ( requires paid subscription )

• The Link Between Self-assessment and Examination Performance
• Does Self- and Peer Assessment Improve Learning in Groups?
• What Fitness Bands Can Teach Us about Classroom Assessment

Related Products

Each 20-Minute Mentor is $19 for individual, on-demand, one-week access, and each Magna Online Seminar is $39 for individual, on-demand, one-week access.

2 0-Minute Mentor: How Can I Build a Mindset for Assessment in an Academic Department?

20-Minute Mentor: How Can I Analyze Department Data and Move Towards Closing the Assessment Loop?

Types of educational assessment

While most faculty stick with the tried-and-true quiz and paper assessment strategies for their online courses, the wide range of technologies available today offers a variety of assessment options beyond the traditional forms. But what do students think of these different forms? And more importantly, what types of educational assessment work best for your course and your students?

A few educational assessments that we will cover:

• A learning assessment technique (LAT) is a three-part integrated structure that helps teachers to first identify significant learning goals, then to implement effectively the kinds of learning activities that help achieve those goals, and finally—and perhaps most importantly—to analyze and report on the learning outcomes that have been achieved from those learning activities.
• Word Clouds.  Word clouds are images composed of words associated with concepts, questions, or reactions sought by an instructor; they are fast, engaging, and can provide an emotional connection for students. Think of the powerful insights a facilitator gains by simply asking students to report a single word describing how they feel about their progress on a project? choice?”). Wordle and TagCloud are two popular choices for creating word clouds.
• Focused Listing.  Focused listing can be used before, during, or after a lesson. This method helps you to gauge student learning.
• Elevator Pitch.  As a review activity, ask students to summarize main ideas or key topics in fewer than 60 seconds. A fun variation of this approach is to have students present to a classmate acting as a well-known personality or theorist who works in your discipline.

Browse the articles and products below to find what educational assessments will work best for your course!

• This Semester, Don’t Forget Participation Feedback!
• Assessments by Design: Rethinking Assessment for Learner Variability
• Reimagining Classroom Community, Assessment, and Our Own Self-care
• Which Assessment Strategies Do Students Prefer?
• Using Interview to Assess and Mentor Students
• Using Screencasts for Formative and Summative Assessment
• Formative Assessment: The Secret Sauce of Blended Success
• Students as Formative Assessment Partners
• Formative Assessment Techniques for Online Learning
• Writing Questions about the Reading: A Formative Assessment Technique
• Three Learning Assessment Techniques to Gauge Student Learning
• Informal Assessment Activities for Blended and Online Courses
• Five Classroom Assessment Techniques for the Online Classroom

Using Authentic Assessment to Assess Student Learning

Magna Online Seminar: Incorporating 360-Degree Assessment into Your Classroom

Magna Online Seminar: Assessment Strategies for Mastery Learning in Large Session Classes

Magna Online Seminar: Assessment Strategies for the Flipped Classroom

Educational assessment tools

Most conventional assessment strategies provide limited opportunities for instructors to realign teaching methods and revisit topics that students have not understood well. Teachers can communicate with students individually, but time constraints may prevent multiple individual conversations. Some students in the classroom are reluctant to ask questions and admit confusion. Find out how to overcome these difficulties with specific educational assessment tools. Below are just a few assessment tools that you’ll find within the articles and products.

• Continuous and Rapid Testing (CaRT): Improves communication between teachers and students
• C.A.P Model : Offers students diverse possibilities to express their understandings of course content, though the explicit aim of the creative component was to center non-dominant cultural ways of knowing, being, and making sense of the world
• Pre-formative assessment: This refers to assessments given while students are learning new material independently, before any group interaction has taken place
• An Anti-racist Form of Assessment: The CAP Model: Creative. Academic. Practical.
• Grading Exams: How Gradescope Revealed Deeper Insights into Our Teaching
• Now More Than Ever: Why Collaborative Grading Works, Even Online
• Leveraging Bloom’s Taxonomy to Elevate Discussion Boards in Online Courses
• Keeping Students Engaged: How to Rethink Your Assessments Amidst the Shift to Online Learning
• But What If They Cheat? Giving Non-proctored Online Assessments

Teaching Professor articles ( paid subscription )

• Four Strategies for Effective Assessment in a Flipped Learning Environment
• Continuous and Rapid Testing (CaRT): A Simple Tool for Assessment and Communication
• Self-Grading: The Ultimate Self-Assessment

Magna Online Seminar: Effective Writing Assessment in the Online Classroom

20-Minute Mentor: How Can I Use Classroom Assessment Techniques ( CATs) Online?

Stay Updated with Faculty Focus!

Get exclusive access to programs, reports, podcast episodes, articles, and more!

• Opens in a new tab

Welcome Back

Username or Email

Remember Me

Already a subscriber? log in here.

• Table of Contents
• Random Entry
• Chronological
• Editorial Information
• About the SEP
• Editorial Board
• How to Cite the SEP
• Special Characters
• Advanced Tools
• Support the SEP
• PDFs for SEP Friends
• Make a Donation
• SEPIA for Libraries
• Entry Contents

Bibliography

Academic tools.

• Friends PDF Preview
• Author and Citation Info
• Back to Top

Philosophy of Education

Philosophy of education is the branch of applied or practical philosophy concerned with the nature and aims of education and the philosophical problems arising from educational theory and practice. Because that practice is ubiquitous in and across human societies, its social and individual manifestations so varied, and its influence so profound, the subject is wide-ranging, involving issues in ethics and social/political philosophy, epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind and language, and other areas of philosophy. Because it looks both inward to the parent discipline and outward to educational practice and the social, legal, and institutional contexts in which it takes place, philosophy of education concerns itself with both sides of the traditional theory/practice divide. Its subject matter includes both basic philosophical issues (e.g., the nature of the knowledge worth teaching, the character of educational equality and justice, etc.) and problems concerning specific educational policies and practices (e.g., the desirability of standardized curricula and testing, the social, economic, legal and moral dimensions of specific funding arrangements, the justification of curriculum decisions, etc.). In all this the philosopher of education prizes conceptual clarity, argumentative rigor, the fair-minded consideration of the interests of all involved in or affected by educational efforts and arrangements, and informed and well-reasoned valuation of educational aims and interventions.

Philosophy of education has a long and distinguished history in the Western philosophical tradition, from Socrates’ battles with the sophists to the present day. Many of the most distinguished figures in that tradition incorporated educational concerns into their broader philosophical agendas (Curren 2000, 2018; Rorty 1998). While that history is not the focus here, it is worth noting that the ideals of reasoned inquiry championed by Socrates and his descendants have long informed the view that education should foster in all students, to the extent possible, the disposition to seek reasons and the ability to evaluate them cogently, and to be guided by their evaluations in matters of belief, action and judgment. This view, that education centrally involves the fostering of reason or rationality, has with varying articulations and qualifications been embraced by most of those historical figures; it continues to be defended by contemporary philosophers of education as well (Scheffler 1973 [1989]; Siegel 1988, 1997, 2007, 2017). As with any philosophical thesis it is controversial; some dimensions of the controversy are explored below.

This entry is a selective survey of important contemporary work in Anglophone philosophy of education; it does not treat in detail recent scholarship outside that context.

1. Problems in Delineating the Field

2. analytic philosophy of education and its influence, 3.1 the content of the curriculum and the aims and functions of schooling, 3.2 social, political and moral philosophy, 3.3 social epistemology, virtue epistemology, and the epistemology of education, 3.4 philosophical disputes concerning empirical education research, 4. concluding remarks, other internet resources, related entries.

The inward/outward looking nature of the field of philosophy of education alluded to above makes the task of delineating the field, of giving an over-all picture of the intellectual landscape, somewhat complicated (for a detailed account of this topography, see Phillips 1985, 2010). Suffice it to say that some philosophers, as well as focusing inward on the abstract philosophical issues that concern them, are drawn outwards to discuss or comment on issues that are more commonly regarded as falling within the purview of professional educators, educational researchers, policy-makers and the like. (An example is Michael Scriven, who in his early career was a prominent philosopher of science; later he became a central figure in the development of the field of evaluation of educational and social programs. See Scriven 1991a, 1991b.) At the same time, there are professionals in the educational or closely related spheres who are drawn to discuss one or another of the philosophical issues that they encounter in the course of their work. (An example here is the behaviorist psychologist B.F. Skinner, the central figure in the development of operant conditioning and programmed learning, who in works such as Walden Two (1948) and Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1972) grappled—albeit controversially—with major philosophical issues that were related to his work.)

What makes the field even more amorphous is the existence of works on educational topics, written by well-regarded philosophers who have made major contributions to their discipline; these educational reflections have little or no philosophical content, illustrating the truth that philosophers do not always write philosophy. However, despite this, works in this genre have often been treated as contributions to philosophy of education. (Examples include John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education [1693] and Bertrand Russell’s rollicking pieces written primarily to raise funds to support a progressive school he ran with his wife. (See Park 1965.)

Finally, as indicated earlier, the domain of education is vast, the issues it raises are almost overwhelmingly numerous and are of great complexity, and the social significance of the field is second to none. These features make the phenomena and problems of education of great interest to a wide range of socially-concerned intellectuals, who bring with them their own favored conceptual frameworks—concepts, theories and ideologies, methods of analysis and argumentation, metaphysical and other assumptions, and the like. It is not surprising that scholars who work in this broad genre also find a home in the field of philosophy of education.

As a result of these various factors, the significant intellectual and social trends of the past few centuries, together with the significant developments in philosophy, all have had an impact on the content of arguments and methods of argumentation in philosophy of education—Marxism, psycho-analysis, existentialism, phenomenology, positivism, post-modernism, pragmatism, neo-liberalism, the several waves of feminism, analytic philosophy in both its ordinary language and more formal guises, are merely the tip of the iceberg.

Conceptual analysis, careful assessment of arguments, the rooting out of ambiguity, the drawing of clarifying distinctions—all of which are at least part of the philosophical toolkit—have been respected activities within philosophy from the dawn of the field. No doubt it somewhat over-simplifies the complex path of intellectual history to suggest that what happened in the twentieth century—early on, in the home discipline itself, and with a lag of a decade or more in philosophy of education—is that philosophical analysis came to be viewed by some scholars as being the major philosophical activity (or set of activities), or even as being the only viable or reputable activity. In any case, as they gained prominence and for a time hegemonic influence during the rise of analytic philosophy early in the twentieth century analytic techniques came to dominate philosophy of education in the middle third of that century (Curren, Robertson, & Hager 2003).

The pioneering work in the modern period entirely in an analytic mode was the short monograph by C.D. Hardie, Truth and Fallacy in Educational Theory (1941; reissued in 1962). In his Introduction, Hardie (who had studied with C.D. Broad and I.A. Richards) made it clear that he was putting all his eggs into the ordinary-language-analysis basket:

The Cambridge analytical school, led by Moore, Broad and Wittgenstein, has attempted so to analyse propositions that it will always be apparent whether the disagreement between philosophers is one concerning matters of fact, or is one concerning the use of words, or is, as is frequently the case, a purely emotive one. It is time, I think, that a similar attitude became common in the field of educational theory. (Hardie 1962: xix)

About a decade after the end of the Second World War the floodgates opened and a stream of work in the analytic mode appeared; the following is merely a sample. D. J. O’Connor published An Introduction to Philosophy of Education (1957) in which, among other things, he argued that the word “theory” as it is used in educational contexts is merely a courtesy title, for educational theories are nothing like what bear this title in the natural sciences. Israel Scheffler, who became the paramount philosopher of education in North America, produced a number of important works including The Language of Education (1960), which contained clarifying and influential analyses of definitions (he distinguished reportive, stipulative, and programmatic types) and the logic of slogans (often these are literally meaningless, and, he argued, should be seen as truncated arguments), Conditions of Knowledge (1965), still the best introduction to the epistemological side of philosophy of education, and Reason and Teaching (1973 [1989]), which in a wide-ranging and influential series of essays makes the case for regarding the fostering of rationality/critical thinking as a fundamental educational ideal (cf. Siegel 2016). B. O. Smith and R. H. Ennis edited the volume Language and Concepts in Education (1961); and R.D. Archambault edited Philosophical Analysis and Education (1965), consisting of essays by a number of prominent British writers, most notably R. S. Peters (whose status in Britain paralleled that of Scheffler in the United States), Paul Hirst, and John Wilson. Topics covered in the Archambault volume were typical of those that became the “bread and butter” of analytic philosophy of education (APE) throughout the English-speaking world—education as a process of initiation, liberal education, the nature of knowledge, types of teaching, and instruction versus indoctrination.

Among the most influential products of APE was the analysis developed by Hirst and Peters (1970) and Peters (1973) of the concept of education itself. Using as a touchstone “normal English usage,” it was concluded that a person who has been educated (rather than instructed or indoctrinated) has been (i) changed for the better; (ii) this change has involved the acquisition of knowledge and intellectual skills and the development of understanding; and (iii) the person has come to care for, or be committed to, the domains of knowledge and skill into which he or she has been initiated. The method used by Hirst and Peters comes across clearly in their handling of the analogy with the concept of “reform”, one they sometimes drew upon for expository purposes. A criminal who has been reformed has changed for the better, and has developed a commitment to the new mode of life (if one or other of these conditions does not hold, a speaker of standard English would not say the criminal has been reformed). Clearly the analogy with reform breaks down with respect to the knowledge and understanding conditions. Elsewhere Peters developed the fruitful notion of “education as initiation”.

The concept of indoctrination was also of great interest to analytic philosophers of education, for, it was argued, getting clear about precisely what constitutes indoctrination also would serve to clarify the border that demarcates it from acceptable educational processes. Thus, whether or not an instructional episode was a case of indoctrination was determined by the content taught, the intention of the instructor, the methods of instruction used, the outcomes of the instruction, or by some combination of these. Adherents of the different analyses used the same general type of argument to make their case, namely, appeal to normal and aberrant usage. Unfortunately, ordinary language analysis did not lead to unanimity of opinion about where this border was located, and rival analyses of the concept were put forward (Snook 1972). The danger of restricting analysis to ordinary language (“normal English usage”) was recognized early on by Scheffler, whose preferred view of analysis emphasized

first, its greater sophistication as regards language, and the interpenetration of language and inquiry, second, its attempt to follow the modern example of the sciences in empirical spirit, in rigor, in attention to detail, in respect for alternatives, and in objectivity of method, and third, its use of techniques of symbolic logic brought to full development only in the last fifty years… It is…this union of scientific spirit and logical method applied toward the clarification of basic ideas that characterizes current analytic philosophy [and that ought to characterize analytic philosophy of education]. (Scheffler 1973 [1989: 9–10])

After a period of dominance, for a number of important reasons the influence of APE went into decline. First, there were growing criticisms that the work of analytic philosophers of education had become focused upon minutiae and in the main was bereft of practical import. (It is worth noting that a 1966 article in Time , reprinted in Lucas 1969, had put forward the same criticism of mainstream philosophy.) Second, in the early 1970’s radical students in Britain accused Peters’ brand of linguistic analysis of conservatism, and of tacitly giving support to “traditional values”—they raised the issue of whose English usage was being analyzed?

Third, criticisms of language analysis in mainstream philosophy had been mounting for some time, and finally after a lag of many years were reaching the attention of philosophers of education; there even had been a surprising degree of interest on the part of the general reading public in the United Kingdom as early as 1959, when Gilbert Ryle, editor of the journal Mind , refused to commission a review of Ernest Gellner’s Words and Things (1959)—a detailed and quite acerbic critique of Wittgenstein’s philosophy and its espousal of ordinary language analysis. (Ryle argued that Gellner’s book was too insulting, a view that drew Bertrand Russell into the fray on Gellner’s side—in the daily press, no less; Russell produced a list of insulting remarks drawn from the work of great philosophers of the past. See Mehta 1963.)

Richard Peters had been given warning that all was not well with APE at a conference in Canada in 1966; after delivering a paper on “The aims of education: A conceptual inquiry” that was based on ordinary language analysis, a philosopher in the audience (William Dray) asked Peters “ whose concepts do we analyze?” Dray went on to suggest that different people, and different groups within society, have different concepts of education. Five years before the radical students raised the same issue, Dray pointed to the possibility that what Peters had presented under the guise of a “logical analysis” was nothing but the favored usage of a certain class of persons—a class that Peters happened to identify with (see Peters 1973, where to the editor’s credit the interaction with Dray is reprinted).

Fourth, during the decade of the seventies when these various critiques of analytic philosophy were in the process of eroding its luster, a spate of translations from the Continent stimulated some philosophers of education in Britain and North America to set out in new directions, and to adopt a new style of writing and argumentation. Key works by Gadamer, Foucault and Derrida appeared in English, and these were followed in 1984 by Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition . The classic works of Heidegger and Husserl also found new admirers; and feminist philosophers of education were finding their voices—Maxine Greene published a number of pieces in the 1970s and 1980s, including The Dialectic of Freedom (1988); the influential book by Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education , appeared the same year as the work by Lyotard, followed a year later by Jane Roland Martin’s Reclaiming a Conversation . In more recent years all these trends have continued. APE was and is no longer the center of interest, although, as indicated below, it still retains its voice.

3. Areas of Contemporary Activity

As was stressed at the outset, the field of education is huge and contains within it a virtually inexhaustible number of issues that are of philosophical interest. To attempt comprehensive coverage of how philosophers of education have been working within this thicket would be a quixotic task for a large single volume and is out of the question for a solitary encyclopedia entry. Nevertheless, a valiant attempt to give an overview was made in A Companion to the Philosophy of Education (Curren 2003), which contains more than six-hundred pages divided into forty-five chapters each of which surveys a subfield of work. The following random selection of chapter topics gives a sense of the enormous scope of the field: Sex education, special education, science education, aesthetic education, theories of teaching and learning, religious education, knowledge, truth and learning, cultivating reason, the measurement of learning, multicultural education, education and the politics of identity, education and standards of living, motivation and classroom management, feminism, critical theory, postmodernism, romanticism, the purposes of universities, affirmative action in higher education, and professional education. The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Education (Siegel 2009) contains a similarly broad range of articles on (among other things) the epistemic and moral aims of education, liberal education and its imminent demise, thinking and reasoning, fallibilism and fallibility, indoctrination, authenticity, the development of rationality, Socratic teaching, educating the imagination, caring and empathy in moral education, the limits of moral education, the cultivation of character, values education, curriculum and the value of knowledge, education and democracy, art and education, science education and religious toleration, constructivism and scientific methods, multicultural education, prejudice, authority and the interests of children, and on pragmatist, feminist, and postmodernist approaches to philosophy of education.

Given this enormous range, there is no non-arbitrary way to select a small number of topics for further discussion, nor can the topics that are chosen be pursued in great depth. The choice of those below has been made with an eye to highlighting contemporary work that makes solid contact with and contributes to important discussions in general philosophy and/or the academic educational and educational research communities.

The issue of what should be taught to students at all levels of education—the issue of curriculum content—obviously is a fundamental one, and it is an extraordinarily difficult one with which to grapple. In tackling it, care needs to be taken to distinguish between education and schooling—for although education can occur in schools, so can mis-education, and many other things can take place there that are educationally orthogonal (such as the provision of free or subsidized lunches and the development of social networks); and it also must be recognized that education can occur in the home, in libraries and museums, in churches and clubs, in solitary interaction with the public media, and the like.

In developing a curriculum (whether in a specific subject area, or more broadly as the whole range of offerings in an educational institution or system), a number of difficult decisions need to be made. Issues such as the proper ordering or sequencing of topics in the chosen subject, the time to be allocated to each topic, the lab work or excursions or projects that are appropriate for particular topics, can all be regarded as technical issues best resolved either by educationists who have a depth of experience with the target age group or by experts in the psychology of learning and the like. But there are deeper issues, ones concerning the validity of the justifications that have been given for including/excluding particular subjects or topics in the offerings of formal educational institutions. (Why should evolution or creation “science” be included, or excluded, as a topic within the standard high school subject Biology? Is the justification that is given for teaching Economics in some schools coherent and convincing? Do the justifications for including/excluding materials on birth control, patriotism, the Holocaust or wartime atrocities in the curriculum in some school districts stand up to critical scrutiny?)

The different justifications for particular items of curriculum content that have been put forward by philosophers and others since Plato’s pioneering efforts all draw, explicitly or implicitly, upon the positions that the respective theorists hold about at least three sets of issues.

First, what are the aims and/or functions of education (aims and functions are not necessarily the same)? Many aims have been proposed; a short list includes the production of knowledge and knowledgeable students, the fostering of curiosity and inquisitiveness, the enhancement of understanding, the enlargement of the imagination, the civilizing of students, the fostering of rationality and/or autonomy, and the development in students of care, concern and associated dispositions and attitudes (see Siegel 2007 for a longer list). The justifications offered for all such aims have been controversial, and alternative justifications of a single proposed aim can provoke philosophical controversy. Consider the aim of autonomy. Aristotle asked, what constitutes the good life and/or human flourishing, such that education should foster these (Curren 2013)? These two formulations are related, for it is arguable that our educational institutions should aim to equip individuals to pursue this good life—although this is not obvious, both because it is not clear that there is one conception of the good or flourishing life that is the good or flourishing life for everyone, and it is not clear that this is a question that should be settled in advance rather than determined by students for themselves. Thus, for example, if our view of human flourishing includes the capacity to think and act autonomously, then the case can be made that educational institutions—and their curricula—should aim to prepare, or help to prepare, autonomous individuals. A rival justification of the aim of autonomy, associated with Kant, champions the educational fostering of autonomy not on the basis of its contribution to human flourishing, but rather the obligation to treat students with respect as persons (Scheffler 1973 [1989]; Siegel 1988). Still others urge the fostering of autonomy on the basis of students’ fundamental interests, in ways that draw upon both Aristotelian and Kantian conceptual resources (Brighouse 2005, 2009). It is also possible to reject the fostering of autonomy as an educational aim (Hand 2006).

Assuming that the aim can be justified, how students should be helped to become autonomous or develop a conception of the good life and pursue it is of course not immediately obvious, and much philosophical ink has been spilled on the general question of how best to determine curriculum content. One influential line of argument was developed by Paul Hirst, who argued that knowledge is essential for developing and then pursuing a conception of the good life, and because logical analysis shows, he argued, that there are seven basic forms of knowledge, the case can be made that the function of the curriculum is to introduce students to each of these forms (Hirst 1965; see Phillips 1987: ch. 11). Another, suggested by Scheffler, is that curriculum content should be selected so as “to help the learner attain maximum self-sufficiency as economically as possible.” The relevant sorts of economy include those of resources, teacher effort, student effort, and the generalizability or transfer value of content, while the self-sufficiency in question includes

self-awareness, imaginative weighing of alternative courses of action, understanding of other people’s choices and ways of life, decisiveness without rigidity, emancipation from stereotyped ways of thinking and perceiving…empathy… intuition, criticism and independent judgment. (Scheffler 1973 [1989: 123–5])

Both impose important constraints on the curricular content to be taught.

Second, is it justifiable to treat the curriculum of an educational institution as a vehicle for furthering the socio-political interests and goals of a dominant group, or any particular group, including one’s own; and relatedly, is it justifiable to design the curriculum so that it serves as an instrument of control or of social engineering? In the closing decades of the twentieth century there were numerous discussions of curriculum theory, particularly from Marxist and postmodern perspectives, that offered the sobering analysis that in many educational systems, including those in Western democracies, the curriculum did indeed reflect and serve the interests of powerful cultural elites. What to do about this situation (if it is indeed the situation of contemporary educational institutions) is far from clear and is the focus of much work at the interface of philosophy of education and social/political philosophy, some of which is discussed in the next section. A closely related question is this: ought educational institutions be designed to further pre-determined social ends, or rather to enable students to competently evaluate all such ends? Scheffler argued that we should opt for the latter: we must

surrender the idea of shaping or molding the mind of the pupil. The function of education…is rather to liberate the mind, strengthen its critical powers, [and] inform it with knowledge and the capacity for independent inquiry. (Scheffler 1973 [1989: 139])

Third, should educational programs at the elementary and secondary levels be made up of a number of disparate offerings, so that individuals with different interests and abilities and affinities for learning can pursue curricula that are suitable? Or should every student pursue the same curriculum as far as each is able?—a curriculum, it should be noted, that in past cases nearly always was based on the needs or interests of those students who were academically inclined or were destined for elite social roles. Mortimer Adler and others in the late twentieth century sometimes used the aphorism “the best education for the best is the best education for all.”

The thinking here can be explicated in terms of the analogy of an out-of-control virulent disease, for which there is only one type of medicine available; taking a large dose of this medicine is extremely beneficial, and the hope is that taking only a little—while less effective—is better than taking none at all. Medically, this is dubious, while the educational version—forcing students to work, until they exit the system, on topics that do not interest them and for which they have no facility or motivation—has even less merit. (For a critique of Adler and his Paideia Proposal , see Noddings 2015.) It is interesting to compare the modern “one curriculum track for all” position with Plato’s system outlined in the Republic , according to which all students—and importantly this included girls—set out on the same course of study. Over time, as they moved up the educational ladder it would become obvious that some had reached the limit imposed upon them by nature, and they would be directed off into appropriate social roles in which they would find fulfillment, for their abilities would match the demands of these roles. Those who continued on with their education would eventually become members of the ruling class of Guardians.

The publication of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice in 1971 was the most notable event in the history of political philosophy over the last century. The book spurred a period of ferment in political philosophy that included, among other things, new research on educationally fundamental themes. The principles of justice in educational distribution have perhaps been the dominant theme in this literature, and Rawls’s influence on its development has been pervasive.

Rawls’s theory of justice made so-called “fair equality of opportunity” one of its constitutive principles. Fair equality of opportunity entailed that the distribution of education would not put the children of those who currently occupied coveted social positions at any competitive advantage over other, equally talented and motivated children seeking the qualifications for those positions (Rawls 1971: 72–75). Its purpose was to prevent socio-economic differences from hardening into social castes that were perpetuated across generations. One obvious criticism of fair equality of opportunity is that it does not prohibit an educational distribution that lavished resources on the most talented children while offering minimal opportunities to others. So long as untalented students from wealthy families were assigned opportunities no better than those available to their untalented peers among the poor, no breach of the principle would occur. Even the most moderate egalitarians might find such a distributive regime to be intuitively repugnant.

Repugnance might be mitigated somewhat by the ways in which the overall structure of Rawls’s conception of justice protects the interests of those who fare badly in educational competition. All citizens must enjoy the same basic liberties, and equal liberty always has moral priority over equal opportunity: the former can never be compromised to advance the latter. Further, inequality in the distribution of income and wealth are permitted only to the degree that it serves the interests of the least advantaged group in society. But even with these qualifications, fair equality of opportunity is arguably less than really fair to anyone. The fact that their education should secure ends other than access to the most selective social positions—ends such as artistic appreciation, the kind of self-knowledge that humanistic study can furnish, or civic virtue—is deemed irrelevant according to Rawls’s principle. But surely it is relevant, given that a principle of educational justice must be responsive to the full range of educationally important goods.

Suppose we revise our account of the goods included in educational distribution so that aesthetic appreciation, say, and the necessary understanding and virtue for conscientious citizenship count for just as much as job-related skills. An interesting implication of doing so is that the rationale for requiring equality under any just distribution becomes decreasingly clear. That is because job-related skills are positional whereas the other educational goods are not (Hollis 1982). If you and I both aspire to a career in business management for which we are equally qualified, any increase in your job-related skills is a corresponding disadvantage to me unless I can catch up. Positional goods have a competitive structure by definition, though the ends of civic or aesthetic education do not fit that structure. If you and I aspire to be good citizens and are equal in civic understanding and virtue, an advance in your civic education is no disadvantage to me. On the contrary, it is easier to be a good citizen the better other citizens learn to be. At the very least, so far as non-positional goods figure in our conception of what counts as a good education, the moral stakes of inequality are thereby lowered.

In fact, an emerging alternative to fair equality of opportunity is a principle that stipulates some benchmark of adequacy in achievement or opportunity as the relevant standard of distribution. But it is misleading to represent this as a contrast between egalitarian and sufficientarian conceptions. Philosophically serious interpretations of adequacy derive from the ideal of equal citizenship (Satz 2007; Anderson 2007). Then again, fair equality of opportunity in Rawls’s theory is derived from a more fundamental ideal of equality among citizens. This was arguably true in A Theory of Justice but it is certainly true in his later work (Dworkin 1977: 150–183; Rawls 1993). So, both Rawls’s principle and the emerging alternative share an egalitarian foundation. The debate between adherents of equal opportunity and those misnamed as sufficientarians is certainly not over (e.g., Brighouse & Swift 2009; Jacobs 2010; Warnick 2015). Further progress will likely hinge on explicating the most compelling conception of the egalitarian foundation from which distributive principles are to be inferred. Another Rawls-inspired alternative is that a “prioritarian” distribution of achievement or opportunity might turn out to be the best principle we can come up with—i.e., one that favors the interests of the least advantaged students (Schouten 2012).

The publication of Rawls’s Political Liberalism in 1993 signaled a decisive turning point in his thinking about justice. In his earlier book, the theory of justice had been presented as if it were universally valid. But Rawls had come to think that any theory of justice presented as such was open to reasonable rejection. A more circumspect approach to justification would seek grounds for justice as fairness in an overlapping consensus between the many reasonable values and doctrines that thrive in a democratic political culture. Rawls argued that such a culture is informed by a shared ideal of free and equal citizenship that provided a new, distinctively democratic framework for justifying a conception of justice. The shift to political liberalism involved little revision on Rawls’s part to the content of the principles he favored. But the salience it gave to questions about citizenship in the fabric of liberal political theory had important educational implications. How was the ideal of free and equal citizenship to be instantiated in education in a way that accommodated the range of reasonable values and doctrines encompassed in an overlapping consensus? Political Liberalism has inspired a range of answers to that question (cf. Callan 1997; Clayton 2006; Bull 2008).

Other philosophers besides Rawls in the 1990s took up a cluster of questions about civic education, and not always from a liberal perspective. Alasdair Macintyre’s After Virtue (1984) strongly influenced the development of communitarian political theory which, as its very name might suggest, argued that the cultivation of community could preempt many of the problems with conflicting individual rights at the core of liberalism. As a full-standing alternative to liberalism, communitarianism might have little to recommend it. But it was a spur for liberal philosophers to think about how communities could be built and sustained to support the more familiar projects of liberal politics (e.g., Strike 2010). Furthermore, its arguments often converged with those advanced by feminist exponents of the ethic of care (Noddings 1984; Gilligan 1982). Noddings’ work is particularly notable because she inferred a cogent and radical agenda for the reform of schools from her conception of care (Noddings 1992).

One persistent controversy in citizenship theory has been about whether patriotism is correctly deemed a virtue, given our obligations to those who are not our fellow citizens in an increasingly interdependent world and the sordid history of xenophobia with which modern nation states are associated. The controversy is partly about what we should teach in our schools and is commonly discussed by philosophers in that context (Galston 1991; Ben-Porath 2006; Callan 2006; Miller 2007; Curren & Dorn 2018). The controversy is related to a deeper and more pervasive question about how morally or intellectually taxing the best conception of our citizenship should be. The more taxing it is, the more constraining its derivative conception of civic education will be. Contemporary political philosophers offer divergent arguments about these matters. For example, Gutmann and Thompson claim that citizens of diverse democracies need to “understand the diverse ways of life of their fellow citizens” (Gutmann & Thompson 1996: 66). The need arises from the obligation of reciprocity which they (like Rawls) believe to be integral to citizenship. Because I must seek to cooperate with others politically on terms that make sense from their moral perspective as well as my own, I must be ready to enter that perspective imaginatively so as to grasp its distinctive content. Many such perspectives prosper in liberal democracies, and so the task of reciprocal understanding is necessarily onerous. Still, our actions qua deliberative citizen must be grounded in such reciprocity if political cooperation on terms acceptable to us as (diversely) morally motivated citizens is to be possible at all. This is tantamount to an imperative to think autonomously inside the role of citizen because I cannot close-mindedly resist critical consideration of moral views alien to my own without flouting my responsibilities as a deliberative citizen.

Civic education does not exhaust the domain of moral education, even though the more robust conceptions of equal citizenship have far-reaching implications for just relations in civil society and the family. The study of moral education has traditionally taken its bearings from normative ethics rather than political philosophy, and this is largely true of work undertaken in recent decades. The major development here has been the revival of virtue ethics as an alternative to the deontological and consequentialist theories that dominated discussion for much of the twentieth century.

The defining idea of virtue ethics is that our criterion of moral right and wrong must derive from a conception of how the ideally virtuous agent would distinguish between the two. Virtue ethics is thus an alternative to both consequentialism and deontology which locate the relevant criterion in producing good consequences or meeting the requirements of moral duty respectively. The debate about the comparative merits of these theories is not resolved, but from an educational perspective that may be less important than it has sometimes seemed to antagonists in the debate. To be sure, adjudicating between rival theories in normative ethics might shed light on how best to construe the process of moral education, and philosophical reflection on the process might help us to adjudicate between the theories. There has been extensive work on habituation and virtue, largely inspired by Aristotle (Burnyeat 1980; Peters 1981). But whether this does anything to establish the superiority of virtue ethics over its competitors is far from obvious. Other aspects of moral education—in particular, the paired processes of role-modelling and identification—deserve much more scrutiny than they have received (Audi 2017; Kristjánsson 2015, 2017).

Related to the issues concerning the aims and functions of education and schooling rehearsed above are those involving the specifically epistemic aims of education and attendant issues treated by social and virtue epistemologists. (The papers collected in Kotzee 2013 and Baehr 2016 highlight the current and growing interactions among social epistemologists, virtue epistemologists, and philosophers of education.)

There is, first, a lively debate concerning putative epistemic aims. Alvin Goldman argues that truth (or knowledge understood in the “weak” sense of true belief) is the fundamental epistemic aim of education (Goldman 1999). Others, including the majority of historically significant philosophers of education, hold that critical thinking or rationality and rational belief (or knowledge in the “strong” sense that includes justification) is the basic epistemic educational aim (Bailin & Siegel 2003; Scheffler 1965, 1973 [1989]; Siegel 1988, 1997, 2005, 2017). Catherine Z. Elgin (1999a,b) and Duncan Pritchard (2013, 2016; Carter & Pritchard 2017) have independently urged that understanding is the basic aim. Pritchard’s view combines understanding with intellectual virtue ; Jason Baehr (2011) systematically defends the fostering of the intellectual virtues as the fundamental epistemic aim of education. This cluster of views continues to engender ongoing discussion and debate. (Its complex literature is collected in Carter and Kotzee 2015, summarized in Siegel 2018, and helpfully analyzed in Watson 2016.)

A further controversy concerns the places of testimony and trust in the classroom: In what circumstances if any ought students to trust their teachers’ pronouncements, and why? Here the epistemology of education is informed by social epistemology, specifically the epistemology of testimony; the familiar reductionism/anti-reductionism controversy there is applicable to students and teachers. Anti-reductionists, who regard testimony as a basic source of justification, may with equanimity approve of students’ taking their teachers’ word at face value and believing what they say; reductionists may balk. Does teacher testimony itself constitute good reason for student belief?

The correct answer here seems clearly enough to be “it depends”. For very young children who have yet to acquire or develop the ability to subject teacher declarations to critical scrutiny, there seems to be little alternative to accepting what their teachers tell them. For older and more cognitively sophisticated students there seem to be more options: they can assess them for plausibility, compare them with other opinions, assess the teachers’ proffered reasons, subject them to independent evaluation, etc. Regarding “the teacher says that p ” as itself a good reason to believe it appears moreover to contravene the widely shared conviction that an important educational aim is helping students to become able to evaluate candidate beliefs for themselves and believe accordingly. That said, all sides agree that sometimes believers, including students, have good reasons simply to trust what others tell them. There is thus more work to do here by both social epistemologists and philosophers of education (for further discussion see Goldberg 2013; Siegel 2005, 2018).

A further cluster of questions, of long-standing interest to philosophers of education, concerns indoctrination : How if at all does it differ from legitimate teaching? Is it inevitable, and if so is it not always necessarily bad? First, what is it? As we saw earlier, extant analyses focus on the aims or intentions of the indoctrinator, the methods employed, or the content transmitted. If the indoctrination is successful, all have the result that students/victims either don’t, won’t, or can’t subject the indoctrinated material to proper epistemic evaluation. In this way it produces both belief that is evidentially unsupported or contravened and uncritical dispositions to believe. It might seem obvious that indoctrination, so understood, is educationally undesirable. But it equally seems that very young children, at least, have no alternative but to believe sans evidence; they have yet to acquire the dispositions to seek and evaluate evidence, or the abilities to recognize evidence or evaluate it. Thus we seem driven to the views that indoctrination is both unavoidable and yet bad and to be avoided. It is not obvious how this conundrum is best handled. One option is to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable indoctrination. Another is to distinguish between indoctrination (which is always bad) and non-indoctrinating belief inculcation, the latter being such that students are taught some things without reasons (the alphabet, the numbers, how to read and count, etc.), but in such a way that critical evaluation of all such material (and everything else) is prized and fostered (Siegel 1988: ch. 5). In the end the distinctions required by the two options might be extensionally equivalent (Siegel 2018).

Education, it is generally granted, fosters belief : in the typical propositional case, Smith teaches Jones that p , and if all goes well Jones learns it and comes to believe it. Education also has the task of fostering open-mindedness and an appreciation of our fallibility : All the theorists mentioned thus far, especially those in the critical thinking and intellectual virtue camps, urge their importance. But these two might seem at odds. If Jones (fully) believes that p , can she also be open-minded about it? Can she believe, for example, that earthquakes are caused by the movements of tectonic plates, while also believing that perhaps they aren’t? This cluster of italicized notions requires careful handling; it is helpfully discussed by Jonathan Adler (2002, 2003), who recommends regarding the latter two as meta-attitudes concerning one’s first-order beliefs rather than lessened degrees of belief or commitments to those beliefs.

Other traditional epistemological worries that impinge upon the epistemology of education concern (a) absolutism , pluralism and relativism with respect to knowledge, truth and justification as these relate to what is taught, (b) the character and status of group epistemologies and the prospects for understanding such epistemic goods “universalistically” in the face of “particularist” challenges, (c) the relation between “knowledge-how” and “knowledge-that” and their respective places in the curriculum, (d) concerns raised by multiculturalism and the inclusion/exclusion of marginalized perspectives in curriculum content and the classroom, and (e) further issues concerning teaching and learning. (There is more here than can be briefly summarized; for more references and systematic treatment cf. Bailin & Siegel 2003; Carter & Kotzee 2015; Cleverley & Phillips 1986; Robertson 2009; Siegel 2004, 2017; and Watson 2016.)

The educational research enterprise has been criticized for a century or more by politicians, policymakers, administrators, curriculum developers, teachers, philosophers of education, and by researchers themselves—but the criticisms have been contradictory. Charges of being “too ivory tower and theory-oriented” are found alongside “too focused on practice and too atheoretical”; but in light of the views of John Dewey and William James that the function of theory is to guide intelligent practice and problem-solving, it is becoming more fashionable to hold that the “theory v. practice” dichotomy is a false one. (For an illuminating account of the historical development of educational research and its tribulations, see Lagemann 2000.)

A similar trend can be discerned with respect to the long warfare between two rival groups of research methods—on one hand quantitative/statistical approaches to research, and on the other hand the qualitative/ethnographic family. (The choice of labels here is not entirely risk-free, for they have been contested; furthermore the first approach is quite often associated with “experimental” studies, and the latter with “case studies”, but this is an over-simplification.) For several decades these two rival methodological camps were treated by researchers and a few philosophers of education as being rival paradigms (Kuhn’s ideas, albeit in a very loose form, have been influential in the field of educational research), and the dispute between them was commonly referred to as “the paradigm wars”. In essence the issue at stake was epistemological: members of the quantitative/experimental camp believed that only their methods could lead to well-warranted knowledge claims, especially about the causal factors at play in educational phenomena, and on the whole they regarded qualitative methods as lacking in rigor; on the other hand the adherents of qualitative/ethnographic approaches held that the other camp was too “positivistic” and was operating with an inadequate view of causation in human affairs—one that ignored the role of motives and reasons, possession of relevant background knowledge, awareness of cultural norms, and the like. Few if any commentators in the “paradigm wars” suggested that there was anything prohibiting the use of both approaches in the one research program—provided that if both were used, they were used only sequentially or in parallel, for they were underwritten by different epistemologies and hence could not be blended together. But recently the trend has been towards rapprochement, towards the view that the two methodological families are, in fact, compatible and are not at all like paradigms in the Kuhnian sense(s) of the term; the melding of the two approaches is often called “mixed methods research”, and it is growing in popularity. (For more detailed discussion of these “wars” see Howe 2003 and Phillips 2009.)

The most lively contemporary debates about education research, however, were set in motion around the turn of the millennium when the US Federal Government moved in the direction of funding only rigorously scientific educational research—the kind that could establish causal factors which could then guide the development of practically effective policies. (It was held that such a causal knowledge base was available for medical decision-making.) The definition of “rigorously scientific”, however, was decided by politicians and not by the research community, and it was given in terms of the use of a specific research method—the net effect being that the only research projects to receive Federal funding were those that carried out randomized controlled experiments or field trials (RFTs). It has become common over the last decade to refer to the RFT as the “gold standard” methodology.

The National Research Council (NRC)—an arm of the US National Academies of Science—issued a report, influenced by postpostivistic philosophy of science (NRC 2002), that argued that this criterion was far too narrow. Numerous essays have appeared subsequently that point out how the “gold standard” account of scientific rigor distorts the history of science, how the complex nature of the relation between evidence and policy-making has been distorted and made to appear overly simple (for instance the role of value-judgments in linking empirical findings to policy directives is often overlooked), and qualitative researchers have insisted upon the scientific nature of their work. Nevertheless, and possibly because it tried to be balanced and supported the use of RFTs in some research contexts, the NRC report has been the subject of symposia in four journals, where it has been supported by a few and attacked from a variety of philosophical fronts: Its authors were positivists, they erroneously believed that educational inquiry could be value neutral and that it could ignore the ways in which the exercise of power constrains the research process, they misunderstood the nature of educational phenomena, and so on. This cluster of issues continues to be debated by educational researchers and by philosophers of education and of science, and often involves basic topics in philosophy of science: the constitution of warranting evidence, the nature of theories and of confirmation and explanation, etc. Nancy Cartwright’s important recent work on causation, evidence, and evidence-based policy adds layers of both philosophical sophistication and real world practical analysis to the central issues just discussed (Cartwright & Hardie 2012, Cartwright 2013; cf. Kvernbekk 2015 for an overview of the controversies regarding evidence in the education and philosophy of education literatures).

As stressed earlier, it is impossible to do justice to the whole field of philosophy of education in a single encyclopedia entry. Different countries around the world have their own intellectual traditions and their own ways of institutionalizing philosophy of education in the academic universe, and no discussion of any of this appears in the present essay. But even in the Anglo-American world there is such a diversity of approaches that any author attempting to produce a synoptic account will quickly run into the borders of his or her competence. Clearly this has happened in the present case.

Fortunately, in the last thirty years or so resources have become available that significantly alleviate these problems. There has been a flood of encyclopedia entries, both on the field as a whole and also on many specific topics not well-covered in the present essay (see, as a sample, Burbules 1994; Chambliss 1996b; Curren 1998, 2018; Phillips 1985, 2010; Siegel 2007; Smeyers 1994), two “Encyclopedias” (Chambliss 1996a; Phillips 2014), a “Guide” (Blake, Smeyers, Smith, & Standish 2003), a “Companion” (Curren 2003), two “Handbooks” (Siegel 2009; Bailey, Barrow, Carr, & McCarthy 2010), a comprehensive anthology (Curren 2007), a dictionary of key concepts in the field (Winch & Gingell 1999), and a good textbook or two (Carr 2003; Noddings 2015). In addition there are numerous volumes both of reprinted selections and of specially commissioned essays on specific topics, some of which were given short shrift here (for another sampling see A. Rorty 1998, Stone 1994), and several international journals, including Theory and Research in Education , Journal of Philosophy of Education , Educational Theory , Studies in Philosophy and Education , and Educational Philosophy and Theory . Thus there is more than enough material available to keep the interested reader busy.

• Adler, Jonathan E., 2002, Belief’s Own Ethics , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• –––, 2003, “Knowledge, Truth and Learning”, in Curren 2003: 285–304. doi:10.1002/9780470996454.ch21
• Anderson, Elizabeth, 2007, “Fair Opportunity in Education: A Democratic Equality Perspective”, Ethics , 117(4): 595–622. doi:10.1086/518806
• Archambault, Reginald D. (ed.), 1965, Philosophical Analysis and Education , London: Routledge.
• Audi, Robert, 2017, “Role Modelling and Reasons: Developmental and Normative Grounds of Moral Virtue”, Journal of Moral Philosophy , 14(6): 646–668. doi:10.1163/17455243-46810063
• Baehr, Jason, 2011, The Inquiring Mind: On Intellectual Virtues and Virtue Epistemology , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199604074.001.0001
• ––– (ed.), 2016, Intellectual Virtues and Education: Essays in Applied Virtue Epistemology , New York: Routledge.
• Bailey, Richard, Robin Barrow, David Carr, and Christine McCarthy (eds), 2010, The SAGE Handbook of the Philosophy of Education , Los Angeles: Sage. doi:10.4135/9781446200872
• Bailin, Sharon and Harvey Siegel, 2003, “Critical Thinking”, in Blake et al. 2003: 181–193. doi:10.1002/9780470996294.ch11
• Ben-Porath, Sigal R., 2006. Citizenship Under Fire: Democratic Education in Times of Conflict , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Blake, Nigel, Paul Smeyers, Richard Smith, and Paul Standish (eds.), 2003, The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Education , Oxford: Blackwell. doi:10.1002/9780470996294
• Brighouse, Harry, 2005, On Education , London: Routledge.
• –––, 2009, “Moral and Political Aims of Education”, in Siegel 2009: 35–51.
• Brighouse, Harry and Adam Swift, 2009, “Educational Equality versus Educational Adequacy: A Critique of Anderson and Satz”, Journal of Applied Philosophy , 26(2): 117–128. doi:10.1111/j.1468-5930.2009.00438.x
• Bull, Barry L., 2008, Social Justice in Education: An Introduction , New York: Palgrave MacMillan.
• Burbules, Nicholas C., 1994, “Marxism and Educational Thought”, in The International Encyclopedia of Education , (Volume 6), Torsten Husén and T. Neville Postlethwaite (eds.), Oxford: Pergamon, second edition, pp. 3617–22.
• Burnyeat, Myles F., 1980, “Aristotle on Learning to be Good”, in Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (ed.), Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics , Berkeley CA: University of California Press, pp. 69–92.
• Callan, Eamonn, 1997, Creating Citizens: Political Education and Liberal Democracy , Oxford: Clarendon Press. doi:10.1093/0198292589.001.0001
• –––, 2006, “Love, Idolatry, and Patriotism”, Social Theory and Practice , 32(4): 525–546. doi:10.5840/soctheorpract200632430
• Carr, David, 2003, Making Sense of Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy and Theory of Education and Teaching , London: RoutledgeFalmer.
• Carter, J. Adam and Ben Kotzee, 2015, “Epistemology of Education”, Oxford Bibliographies Online , last modified: 26 October 2015.
• Carter, J.Adam and Duncan Pritchard, 2017, “Epistemic Situationism, Epistemic Dependence, and the Epistemology of Education”, in Abrol Fairweather and Mark Alfano (eds.), Epistemic Situationism , Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 168–191. doi:10.1093/oso/9780199688234.003.0010
• Cartwright, Nancy D., 2013, Evidence: For Policy and Wheresoever Rigor Is a Must , London: London School of Economics and Political Science.
• Cartwright, Nancy D. and Jeremy Hardie, 2012, Evidence-based Policy: A Practical Guide to Doing It Better , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Chambliss, J.J. (ed.), 1996a, Philosophy of Education: An Encyclopedia , New York: Garland.
• Chambliss, J.J., 1996b, “History of Philosophy of Education”, in Chambliss 1996a, pp. 461–472.
• Clayton, Matthew, 2006, Justice and Legitimacy in Upbringing , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/0199268940.001.0001
• Cleverley, John and D.C. Phillips, 1986, Visions of Childhood: Influential Models from Locke to Spock , New York: Teachers College Press.
• Curren, Randall R., 1998, “Education, Philosophy of”, in E.J. Craig (ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy , vol. 3, pp. 231–240.
• –––, 2000, Aristotle on the Necessity of Public Education , Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
• –––, (ed.), 2003, A Companion to the Philosophy of Education , Oxford: Blackwell. doi:10.1002/9780470996454
• –––, (ed.), 2007, Philosophy of Education: An Anthology , Oxford: Blackwell.
• –––, 2013, “A Neo-Aristotelian Account of Education, Justice and the Human Good”, Theory and Research in Education , 11(3): 231–249. doi:10.1177/1477878513498182
• –––, 2018, “Education, History of Philosophy of”, revised second version, in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy Online . doi:10.4324/9780415249126-N014-2
• Curren, Randall, Emily Robertson, and Paul Hager, 2003, “The Analytical Movement”, in Curren 2003: 176–191. doi:10.1002/9780470996454.ch13
• Curren, Randall and Charles Dorn, 2018, Patriotic Education in a Global Age , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Dworkin, Ronald, 1977, Taking Rights Seriously , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Elgin, Catherine Z., 1999a, “Epistemology’s Ends, Pedagogy’s Prospects”, Facta Philosophica , 1: 39–54
• –––, 1999b, “Education and the Advancement of Understanding”, in David M. Steiner (ed.), Proceedings of the 20 th World Congress of Philosophy , vol. 3, Philosophy Documentation Center, pp. 131–140.
• Galston, William A., 1991, Liberal Purposes: Goods, Virtues, and Diversity in the Liberal State , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139172462
• Gellner, Ernest, 1959, Words and Things: A Critical Account of Linguistic Philosophy and a Study in Ideology , London: Gollancz.
• Gilligan, Carol, 1982, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Goldberg, Sanford, 2013, “Epistemic Dependence in Testimonial Belief, in the Classroom and Beyond”, Journal of Philosophy of Education , 47(2): 168–186. doi:10.1111/1467-9752.12019
• Goldman, Alvin I., 1999, Knowledge in a Social World , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/0198238207.001.0001
• Greene, Maxine, 1988, The Dialectic of Freedom , New York: Teachers College Press.
• Gutmann, Amy and Dennis F. Thompson, 1996, Democracy and Disagreement , Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
• Hand, Michael, 2006, “Against Autonomy as an Educational Aim”, Oxford Review of Education , 32(4): 535–550. doi:10.1080/03054980600884250
• Hardie, Charles Dunn, 1941 [1962], Truth and Fallacy in Educational Theory , New York: Teachers College Bureau of Publications.
• Hirst, Paul, 1965, “Liberal Education and the Nature of Knowledge”, in Philosophical Analysis and Education , Reginald D. Archambault, (ed.), London: Routledge, pp. 113–138.
• Hirst, Paul and R.S. Peters, 1970, The Logic of Education , London: Routledge.
• Hollis, Martin, 1982, “Education as A Positional Good”, Journal of Philosophy of Education , 16(2): 235–244. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9752.1982.tb00615.x
• Howe, Kenneth R., 2003, Closing Methodological Divides: Toward Democratic Educational Research , Dordrecht: Kluwer. doi:10.1007/0-306-47984-2
• Jacobs, Lesley A., 2010, “Equality, Adequacy, And Stakes Fairness: Retrieving the Equal Opportunities in Education Approach”, Theory and Research in Education , 8(3): 249–268. doi:10.1177/1477878510381627
• Kotzee, Ben (ed.), 2013, Education and the Growth of Knowledge: Perspectives from Social and Virtue Epistemology , Oxford: Wiley. doi:10.1002/9781118721254
• Kristjánsson, Kristján, 2015, Aristotelian Character Education , London: Routledge.
• –––, 2017, “Emotions Targeting Moral Exemplarity: Making Sense of the Logical Geography of Admiration, Emulation and Elevation”, Theory and Research in Education , 15(1): 20–37. doi:10.1177/1477878517695679
• Kvernbekk, Tone, 2015, Evidence-based Practice in Education: Functions of Evidence and Causal Presuppositions , London: Routledge.
• Lagemann, Ellen Condliffe, 2000, An Elusive Science: The Troubling History of Educational Research , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Locke, J., 1693, Some Thoughts Concerning Education , London: Black Swan in Paternoster Row.
• Lucas, Christopher J. (ed.), 1969, What is Philosophy of Education? , London: Macmillan.
• Lyotard, J-F., 1984, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge , Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• MacIntyre, Alasdair, 1984, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory , second edition, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.
• Martin, Jane Roland, 1985, Reclaiming a Conversation: The Ideal of the Educated Woman , New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
• Mehta, Ved, 1963, Fly and the Fly-Bottle: Encounters with British Intellectuals , London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
• Miller, Richard W., 2007, “Unlearning American Patriotism”, Theory and Research in Education , 5(1): 7–21. doi:10.1177/1477878507073602
• National Research Council (NRC), 2002, Scientific Research in Education , Washington, DC: National Academies Press. [ NRC 2002 available online ]
• Noddings, Nel, 1984, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education , Berkeley: University of California Press.
• –––, 1992, The Challenge to Care in Schools: An Alternative Approach to Education , New York: Teachers College Press.
• –––, 2015, Philosophy of Education , fourth edition, Boulder, CO: Westview.
• O’Connor, D.J., 1957, An Introduction to Philosophy of Education , London: Routledge.
• Park, J., (ed.), 1965, Bertrand Russell on Education , London: Allen and Unwin.
• Peters, R.S., (ed.), 1973, The Philosophy of Education , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 1981, Moral Development and Moral Education , London: G. Allen & Unwin.
• Phillips, D.C., 1985, “Philosophy of Education”, in International Encyclopedia of Education , Torsten Husén and T. Neville Postlethwaite, (eds.), pp. 3859–3877.
• –––, 1987, Philosophy, Science, and Social Inquiry: Contemporary Methodological Controversies in Social Science and Related Applied Fields of Research , Oxford: Pergamon.
• –––, 2009, “Empirical Educational Research: Charting Philosophical Disagreements in an Undisciplined Field”, in Siegel 2009: 381–406.
• –––, 2010, “What Is Philosophy of Education?”, in Bailey et al. 2010: 3–19. doi:10.4135/9781446200872.n1
• –––, (ed.), 2014, Encyclopedia of Educational Theory and Philosophy , Los Angeles: Sage.
• Pritchard, Duncan, 2013, “Epistemic Virtue and the Epistemology of Education”, Journal of Philosophy of Education , 47(2): 236–247. doi:10.1111/1467-9752.12022
• –––, 2016, “Intellectual Virtue, Extended Cognition, and the Epistemology of Education”, in Baehr 2016: 113–127.
• Rawls, John, 1971, A Theory of Justice , Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
• –––, 1993, Political Liberalism , New York: Columbia University Press.
• Robertson, Emily, 2009, “The Epistemic Aims of Education”, in Siegel 2009: 11–34.
• Rorty, Amélie Oksenberg (ed.), 1998, Philosophers on Education: New Historical Perspectives , New York: Routledge.
• Satz, Debra, 2007, “Equality, Adequacy, and Education for Citizenship”, Ethics , 117(4): 623–648. doi:10.1086/518805
• Scheffler, Israel, 1960, The Language of Education , Springfield, IL: Thomas.
• –––, 1965, Conditions of Knowledge: An Introduction to Epistemology and Education , Chicago: Scott, Foresman.
• –––, 1973 [1989], Reason and Teaching , Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.
• Schouten, Gina, 2012, “Fair Educational Opportunity and the Distribution of Natural Ability: Toward a Prioritarian Principle of Educational Justice”, Journal of Philosophy of Education , 46(3): 472–491. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9752.2012.00863.x
• Scriven, Michael, 1991a, “Beyond Formative and Summative Evaluation”, in Milbrey McLaughlin and D.C. Phillips (eds.), Evaluation and Education: At Quarter Century , Chicago: University of Chicago Press/NSSE, pp. 19–64.
• –––, 1991b, Evaluation Thesaurus , Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
• Siegel, Harvey, 1988, Educating Reason: Rationality, Critical Thinking, and Education , New York: Routledge.
• –––, 1997, Rationality Redeemed?: Further Dialogues on an Educational Ideal , New York: Routledge.
• –––, 2004, “Epistemology and Education: An Incomplete Guide to the Social-Epistemological Issues”, Episteme , 1(2): 129–137. doi:10.3366/epi.2004.1.2.129
• –––, 2005, “Truth, Thinking, Testimony and Trust: Alvin Goldman on Epistemology and Education”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research , 71(2): 345–366. doi:10.1111/j.1933-1592.2005.tb00452.x
• –––, 2007, “Philosophy of Education”, in Britannica Online Encyclopedia , last modified 2 February 2018. URL = <https://academic.eb.com/levels/collegiate/article/philosophy-of-education/108550>
• –––, (ed.), 2009, The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Education , New York: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195312881.001.0001
• –––, 2016, “Israel Scheffler”, In J. A Palmer (ed.), Routledge Encyclopaedia of Educational Thinkers , London: Routledge, pp. 428–432.
• –––, 2017, Education’s Epistemology: Rationality, Diversity, and Critical Thinking , New York: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 2018, “The Epistemology of Education”, Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy Online , doi:10.4324/0123456789-P074-1.
• Skinner, B.F., 1948 [1962], Walden Two , New York: Macmillan.
• –––, 1972, Beyond Freedom and Dignity , London: Jonathan Cape.
• Smeyers, Paulus, 1994, “Philosophy of Education: Western European Perspectives”, in The International Encyclopedia of Education , (Volume 8), Torsten Husén and T. Neville Postlethwaite, (eds.), Oxford: Pergamon, second Edition, pp. 4456–61.
• Smith, B. Othanel and Robert H. Ennis (eds.), 1961, Language and Concepts in Education , Chicago: Rand McNally.
• Snook, I.A., 1972, Indoctrination and Education , London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
• Stone, Lynda (ed.), 1994, The Education Feminism Reader , New York: Routledge.
• Strike, Kenneth A., 2010, Small Schools and Strong Communities: A Third Way of School Reform , New York: Teachers College Press.
• Warnick, Bryan R., 2015, “Taming the Conflict over Educational Equality”, Journal of Applied Philosophy , 32(1): 50–66. doi:10.1111/japp.12066
• Watson, Lani, 2016, “The Epistemology of Education”, Philosophy Compass , 11(3): 146–159. doi:10.1111/phc3.12316
• Winch, Christopher and John Gingell, 1999, Key Concepts in the Philosophy of Education , London: Routledge.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• PES (Philosophy of Education Society, North America)
• PESA (Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia)
• PESGB (Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain)
• INPE (International Network of Philosophers of Education)

autonomy: personal | Dewey, John | feminist philosophy, interventions: ethics | feminist philosophy, interventions: liberal feminism | feminist philosophy, interventions: political philosophy | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on autonomy | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on disability | Foucault, Michel | Gadamer, Hans-Georg | liberalism | Locke, John | Lyotard, Jean François | -->ordinary language --> | Plato | postmodernism | Rawls, John | rights: of children | Rousseau, Jean Jacques

Acknowledgments

The authors and editors would like to thank Randall Curren for sending a number of constructive suggestions for the Summer 2018 update of this entry.

Copyright © 2018 by Harvey Siegel D.C. Phillips Eamonn Callan

• Accessibility

Support SEP

Mirror sites.

View this site from another server:

• Info about mirror sites

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is copyright © 2023 by The Metaphysics Research Lab , Department of Philosophy, Stanford University

Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054

• Essay on Importance of Education

Importance of Education Essay

Education is one of the key components for an individual’s success. It has the ability to shape one’s life in the right direction. Education is a process of imparting or acquiring knowledge, and developing the powers of reasoning and judgement. It prepares growing children intellectually for a life with more mature understanding and sensitivity to issues surrounding them. It improves not only the personal life of the people but also their community. Thus, one cannot neglect the significance of Education in life and society. Here, we have provided an essay on the Importance of Education. Students can use this essay to prepare for their English exam or as a speech to participate in the school competition.

Importance of Education

The importance of education in life is immense. It facilitates quality learning for people throughout their life. It inculcates knowledge, belief, skill, values and moral habits. It improves the way of living and raises the social and economic status of individuals. Education makes life better and more peaceful. It transforms the personality of individuals and makes them feel confident.

Well said by Nelson Mandela, “Education is the most powerful weapon to change the world”. To elaborate, it is the foundation of the society which brings economic wealth, social prosperity and political stability. It gives power to people to put their views and showcase their real potential. It strengthens democracy by providing citizens with the tools to participate in the governance process. It acts as an integrative force to foster social cohesion and national identity.

In India, education is a constitutional right of every citizen. So, people of any age group, religion, caste, creed and region are free to receive education. An educated person is respected everywhere and well-treated in society. As a kid, every child dreams of being a doctor, lawyer, engineer, actor, sportsperson, etc. These dreams can come true through education. So, investment in education gives the best return. Well-educated people have more opportunities to get a better job which makes them feel satisfied.

In schools, education is divided into different levels, i.e., preschool, primary, secondary and senior secondary. School education comprises traditional learning which provides students with theoretical knowledge. However, now various efforts are being made to establish inbuilt application-based learning by adding numerous experiments, practicals and extracurricular activities to the school curriculum. Students learn to read, write and represent their viewpoints in front of others. Also, in this era of digital Education, anyone can easily access information online at their fingertips. They can learn new skills and enhance their knowledge.

Steps Taken By Government To Promote Education

Education is evidently an important aspect that no government can ignore in order to ensure the equitable development of a nation. Unfortunately, some children still do not have access to education. The Government has thereby taken initiatives to improve education quality and made it accessible to everyone, especially the poor people.

The Government passed the Right to Education Act 2009 (RTE Act 2009) on 4 August 2009. This Act came into effect on 1 April 2010, following which education has become the fundamental right of every child in India. It provides free and compulsory elementary education to children of the age group of 6-14 years in a neighbourhood school within 1 km, up to Class 8 in India. On similar lines, there are other schemes launched by the government, such as Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan , Mid-Day Meal , Adult Education and Skill Development Scheme, National Means cum Merit Scholarship Scheme, National Program for Education of Girls at Elementary Education, Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalaya, Scheme for Infrastructure Development in Minority Institutions, Beti Bachao , Beti Padhao, etc.

For our country’s growth, we require a well-educated population equipped with the relevant knowledge, attitude and skills. This can be achieved by spreading awareness about the importance of Education in rural areas. There is a famous saying that “If we feed one person, we will eliminate his hunger for only one time. But, if we educate a person, we will change his entire life”. Henceforth he will become capable of earning a livelihood by himself.

This essay on the Importance of Education must have helped students to improve their writing section for the English exam. They can also practice essays on other topics by visiting the CBSE Essay page. Keep learning and stay tuned with BYJU’S for the latest updates on CBSE/ICSE/State Board/Competitive Exams. Also, download the BYJU’S App for interactive study videos.

Frequently Asked Questions on Education Essay

How can the literacy rate in india be increased.

People in rural areas must be informed about the importance of providing education to their children. Also, with the COVID-19 situation, the government should take steps by providing laptops/phones for children to follow online classes.

Are girl children still denied their right to get educated?

Although awareness has now improved, there are still many villages in India where girl children are not provided with proper education or allowed to enrol themselves in schools. This mentality has to change for the betterment of the society.

Teaching subjects/academics alone is enough, or should students be introduced to other forms of educational activities too?

Extracurricular activities, moral value education, etc., are also as important as regular academic teachings.

Leave a Comment Cancel reply

Your Mobile number and Email id will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Request OTP on Voice Call

Post My Comment

Register with BYJU'S & Download Free PDFs

Register with byju's & watch live videos.

• History & Society
• Science & Tech
• Biographies
• Animals & Nature
• Geography & Travel
• Arts & Culture
• Games & Quizzes
• On This Day
• One Good Fact
• New Articles
• Lifestyles & Social Issues
• Philosophy & Religion
• Politics, Law & Government
• World History
• Health & Medicine
• Browse Biographies
• Birds, Reptiles & Other Vertebrates
• Bugs, Mollusks & Other Invertebrates
• Environment
• Fossils & Geologic Time
• Entertainment & Pop Culture
• Sports & Recreation
• Visual Arts
• Demystified
• Image Galleries
• Infographics
• Top Questions
• Britannica Kids
• Saving Earth
• Space Next 50
• Student Center
• Introduction & Top Questions

Prehistoric and primitive cultures

• Mesopotamia
• North China
• The Hindu tradition
• The introduction of Buddhist influences
• Classical India
• Indian influences on Asia
• Xi (Western) Zhou (1046–771 bce )
• Dong (Eastern) Zhou (770–256 bce )
• Qin autocracy (221–206 bce )
• Scholarship under the Han (206 bce –220 ce )
• Introduction of Buddhism
• Ancient Hebrews
• Education of youth
• Higher education
• The institutions
• Physical education
• The primary school
• Secondary education
• Early Roman education
• Roman modifications
• Education in the later Roman Empire
• Ancient Persia
• Elementary education
• Professional education
• Early Russian education: Kiev and Muscovy
• Influences on Muslim education and culture
• Aims and purposes of Muslim education
• Organization of education
• Major periods of Muslim education and learning
• Influence of Islamic learning on the West
• From the beginnings to the 4th century
• From the 5th to the 8th century
• The Irish and English revivals
• The cultural revival under Charlemagne and his successors
• Influences of the Carolingian renaissance abroad
• Education of the laity in the 9th and 10th centuries
• Monastic schools
• Urban schools
• New curricula and philosophies
• Thomist philosophy
• The Italian universities
• The French universities
• The English universities
• Universities elsewhere in Europe
• General characteristics of medieval universities
• Lay education and the lower schools
• The foundations of Muslim education
• The Mughal period
• The Tang dynasty (618–907 ce )
• The Song (960–1279)
• The Mongol period (1206–1368)
• The Ming period (1368–1644)
• The Manchu period (1644–1911/12)
• The ancient period to the 12th century
• Education of the warriors
• Education in the Tokugawa era
• Effect of early Western contacts
• The Muslim influence
• The secular influence
• Early influences
• Emergence of the new gymnasium
• Nonscholastic traditions
• Dutch humanism
• Juan Luis Vives
• The early English humanists
• Luther and the German Reformation
• The English Reformation
• The French Reformation
• The Calvinist Reformation
• The Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation
• The legacy of the Reformation
• The new scientism and rationalism
• The Protestant demand for universal elementary education
• The pedagogy of Ratke
• The pedagogy of Comenius
• The schools of Gotha
• Courtly education
• The teaching congregations
• Female education
• The Puritan reformers
• Royalist education
• The academies
• John Locke’s empiricism and education as conduct
• Giambattista Vico, critic of Cartesianism
• The condition of the schools and universities
• August Hermann Francke
• Johann Julius Hecker
• The Sensationists
• The Rousseauists
• National education under enlightened rulers
• Spanish and Portuguese America
• French Québec
• New England
• The new academies
• The middle colonies
• The Southern colonies
• Newfoundland and the Maritime Provinces.
• The social and historical setting
• The pedagogy of Pestalozzi
• The influence of Pestalozzi
• The pedagogy of Froebel
• The kindergarten movement
• The psychology and pedagogy of Herbart
• The Herbartians
• Other German theorists
• French theorists
• Spencer’s scientism
• Humboldt’s reforms
• Developments after 1815
• Girls’ schools
• The new German universities
• Development of state education
• Elementary Education Act
• Secondary and higher education
• The educational awakening
• Education for females
• New Zealand
• Education under the East India Company
• Indian universities
• The Meiji Restoration and the assimilation of Western civilization
• Establishment of a national system of education
• The conservative reaction
• Establishment of nationalistic education systems
• Promotion of industrial education
• Social and historical background
• Influence of psychology and other fields on education
• Traditional movements
• Progressive education
• Child-centred education
• Scientific-realist education
• Social-reconstructionist education
• Major trends and problems
• Early 19th to early 20th century
• Education Act of 1944
• The comprehensive movement
• Further education
• Imperial Germany
• Weimar Republic
• Nazi Germany
• Changes after World War II
• The Third Republic
• The Netherlands
• Switzerland
• Expansion of American education
• Curriculum reforms
• Federal involvement in local education
• Changes in higher education
• Professional organizations
• Canadian educational reforms
• The administration of public education
• Before 1917
• The Stalinist years, 1931–53
• The Khrushchev reforms
• From Brezhnev to Gorbachev
• Perestroika and education
• The modernization movement
• Education in the republic
• Education under the Nationalist government
• Education under communism
• Post-Mao education
• Communism and the intellectuals
• Education at the beginning of the century
• Education to 1940
• Education changes during World War II
• Education after World War II
• Pre-independence period
• The postindependence period in India
• The postindependence period in Pakistan
• The postindependence period in Bangladesh
• The postindependence period in Sri Lanka
• South Africa
• General influences and policies of the colonial powers
• Education in Portuguese colonies and former colonies
• German educational policy in Africa
• Education in British colonies and former colonies
• Education in French colonies and former colonies
• Education in Belgian colonies and former colonies
• Problems and tasks of African education in the late 20th century
• Colonialism and its consequences
• The second half of the 20th century
• The Islamic revival
• Migration and the brain drain
• The heritage of independence
• Administration
• Primary education and literacy
• Reform trends
• Malaysia and Singapore
• Philippines
• Education and social cohesion
• Education and social conflict
• Education and personal growth
• Education and civil society
• Education and economic development
• Primary-level school enrollments
• Secondary-level school enrollments
• Tertiary-level school enrollments
• Other developments in formal education
• Literacy as a measure of success
• Access to education
• Implications for socioeconomic status
• Social consequences of education in developing countries
• The role of the state
• Social and family interaction
• Alternative forms of education

What was education like in ancient Athens?

How does social class affect education attainment, when did education become compulsory, what are alternative forms of education, do school vouchers offer students access to better education.

Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.

• World History Encyclopedia - Education in the Elizabethan Era
• Academia - Return on Education Using the Concept of Opportunity Cost
• National Geographic - Geography
• Table Of Contents

What does education mean?

Education refers to the discipline that is concerned with methods of teaching and learning in schools or school-like environments, as opposed to various nonformal and informal means of socialization .

Beginning approximately at the end of the 7th or during the 6th century, Athens became the first city-state in ancient Greece to renounce education that was oriented toward the future duties of soldiers. The evolution of Athenian education reflected that of the city itself, which was moving toward increasing democratization.

Research has found that education is the strongest determinant of individuals’ occupational status and chances of success in adult life. However, the correlation between family socioeconomic status and school success or failure appears to have increased worldwide. Long-term trends suggest that as societies industrialize and modernize, social class becomes increasingly important in determining educational outcomes and occupational attainment.

While education is not compulsory in practice everywhere in the world, the right of individuals to an educational program that respects their personality, talents, abilities, and cultural heritage has been upheld in various international agreements, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948; the Declaration of the Rights of the Child of 1959; and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of 1966.

Alternative forms of education have developed since the late 20th century, such as distance learning , homeschooling , and many parallel or supplementary systems of education often designated as “nonformal” and “popular.” Religious institutions also instruct the young and old alike in sacred knowledge as well as in the values and skills required for participation in local, national, and transnational societies.

School vouchers have been a hotly debated topic in the United States. Some parents of voucher recipients reported high levels of satisfaction, and studies have found increased voucher student graduation rates. Some studies have found, however, that students using vouchers to attend private schools instead of public ones did not show significantly higher levels of academic achievement. Learn more at ProCon.org.

Should corporal punishment be used in elementary education settings?

Whether corporal punishment should be used in elementary education settings is widely debated. Some say it is the appropriate discipline for certain children when used in moderation because it sets clear boundaries and motivates children to behave in school. Others say can inflict long-lasting physical and mental harm on students while creating an unsafe and violent school environment. For more on the corporal punishment debate, visit ProCon.org .

Should dress codes be implemented and enforced in education settings?

Whether dress codes should be implemented and enforced in education settings is hotly debated. Some argue dress codes enforce decorum and a serious, professional atmosphere conducive to success, as well as promote safety. Others argue dress codes reinforce racist standards of beauty and dress and are are seldom uniformly mandated, often discriminating against women and marginalized groups. For more on the dress code debate, visit ProCon.org .

Recent News

education , discipline that is concerned with methods of teaching and learning in schools or school-like environments as opposed to various nonformal and informal means of socialization (e.g., rural development projects and education through parent-child relationships).

(Read Arne Duncan’s Britannica essay on “Education: The Great Equalizer.”)

Education can be thought of as the transmission of the values and accumulated knowledge of a society. In this sense, it is equivalent to what social scientists term socialization or enculturation. Children—whether conceived among New Guinea tribespeople, the Renaissance Florentines, or the middle classes of Manhattan—are born without culture . Education is designed to guide them in learning a culture , molding their behaviour in the ways of adulthood , and directing them toward their eventual role in society. In the most primitive cultures , there is often little formal learning—little of what one would ordinarily call school or classes or teachers . Instead, the entire environment and all activities are frequently viewed as school and classes, and many or all adults act as teachers. As societies grow more complex, however, the quantity of knowledge to be passed on from one generation to the next becomes more than any one person can know, and, hence, there must evolve more selective and efficient means of cultural transmission. The outcome is formal education—the school and the specialist called the teacher.

As society becomes ever more complex and schools become ever more institutionalized, educational experience becomes less directly related to daily life, less a matter of showing and learning in the context of the workaday world, and more abstracted from practice, more a matter of distilling, telling, and learning things out of context. This concentration of learning in a formal atmosphere allows children to learn far more of their culture than they are able to do by merely observing and imitating. As society gradually attaches more and more importance to education, it also tries to formulate the overall objectives, content, organization, and strategies of education. Literature becomes laden with advice on the rearing of the younger generation. In short, there develop philosophies and theories of education.

This article discusses the history of education, tracing the evolution of the formal teaching of knowledge and skills from prehistoric and ancient times to the present, and considering the various philosophies that have inspired the resulting systems. Other aspects of education are treated in a number of articles. For a treatment of education as a discipline, including educational organization, teaching methods, and the functions and training of teachers, see teaching ; pedagogy ; and teacher education . For a description of education in various specialized fields, see historiography ; legal education ; medical education ; science, history of . For an analysis of educational philosophy , see education, philosophy of . For an examination of some of the more important aids in education and the dissemination of knowledge, see dictionary ; encyclopaedia ; library ; museum ; printing ; publishing, history of . Some restrictions on educational freedom are discussed in censorship . For an analysis of pupil attributes, see intelligence, human ; learning theory ; psychological testing .

Education in primitive and early civilized cultures

The term education can be applied to primitive cultures only in the sense of enculturation , which is the process of cultural transmission. A primitive person, whose culture is the totality of his universe, has a relatively fixed sense of cultural continuity and timelessness. The model of life is relatively static and absolute, and it is transmitted from one generation to another with little deviation. As for prehistoric education, it can only be inferred from educational practices in surviving primitive cultures.

The purpose of primitive education is thus to guide children to becoming good members of their tribe or band. There is a marked emphasis upon training for citizenship , because primitive people are highly concerned with the growth of individuals as tribal members and the thorough comprehension of their way of life during passage from prepuberty to postpuberty.

Because of the variety in the countless thousands of primitive cultures, it is difficult to describe any standard and uniform characteristics of prepuberty education. Nevertheless, certain things are practiced commonly within cultures. Children actually participate in the social processes of adult activities, and their participatory learning is based upon what the American anthropologist Margaret Mead called empathy , identification, and imitation . Primitive children, before reaching puberty, learn by doing and observing basic technical practices. Their teachers are not strangers but rather their immediate community .

In contrast to the spontaneous and rather unregulated imitations in prepuberty education, postpuberty education in some cultures is strictly standardized and regulated. The teaching personnel may consist of fully initiated men, often unknown to the initiate though they are his relatives in other clans. The initiation may begin with the initiate being abruptly separated from his familial group and sent to a secluded camp where he joins other initiates. The purpose of this separation is to deflect the initiate’s deep attachment away from his family and to establish his emotional and social anchorage in the wider web of his culture.

The initiation “curriculum” does not usually include practical subjects. Instead, it consists of a whole set of cultural values, tribal religion, myths , philosophy, history, rituals, and other knowledge. Primitive people in some cultures regard the body of knowledge constituting the initiation curriculum as most essential to their tribal membership. Within this essential curriculum, religious instruction takes the most prominent place.

The World Bank Group is the largest financier of education in the developing world, working in 94 countries and committed to helping them reach SDG4: access to inclusive and equitable quality education and lifelong learning opportunities for all by 2030.

Education is a human right, a powerful driver of development, and one of the strongest instruments for reducing poverty and improving health, gender equality, peace, and stability. It delivers large, consistent returns in terms of income, and is the most important factor to ensure equity and inclusion.

For individuals, education promotes employment, earnings, health, and poverty reduction. Globally, there is a  9% increase in hourly earnings for every extra year of schooling . For societies, it drives long-term economic growth, spurs innovation, strengthens institutions, and fosters social cohesion.  Education is further a powerful catalyst to climate action through widespread behavior change and skilling for green transitions.

Developing countries have made tremendous progress in getting children into the classroom and more children worldwide are now in school. But learning is not guaranteed, as the  2018 World Development Report  (WDR) stressed.

Making smart and effective investments in people’s education is critical for developing the human capital that will end extreme poverty. At the core of this strategy is the need to tackle the learning crisis, put an end to  Learning Poverty , and help youth acquire the advanced cognitive, socioemotional, technical and digital skills they need to succeed in today’s world. 

In low- and middle-income countries, the share of children living in  Learning Poverty  (that is, the proportion of 10-year-old children that are unable to read and understand a short age-appropriate text) increased from 57% before the pandemic to an estimated  70%  in 2022.

However, learning is in crisis. More than 70 million more people were pushed into poverty during the COVID pandemic, a billion children lost a year of school , and three years later the learning losses suffered have not been recouped .  If a child cannot read with comprehension by age 10, they are unlikely to become fluent readers. They will fail to thrive later in school and will be unable to power their careers and economies once they leave school.

The effects of the pandemic are expected to be long-lasting. Analysis has already revealed deep losses, with international reading scores declining from 2016 to 2021 by more than a year of schooling.  These losses may translate to a 0.68 percentage point in global GDP growth.  The staggering effects of school closures reach beyond learning. This generation of children could lose a combined total of  US$21 trillion in lifetime earnings  in present value or the equivalent of 17% of today’s global GDP – a sharp rise from the 2021 estimate of a US$17 trillion loss. 

Action is urgently needed now – business as usual will not suffice to heal the scars of the pandemic and will not accelerate progress enough to meet the ambitions of SDG 4. We are urging governments to implement ambitious and aggressive Learning Acceleration Programs to get children back to school, recover lost learning, and advance progress by building better, more equitable and resilient education systems.

Last Updated: Mar 25, 2024

The World Bank’s global education strategy is centered on ensuring learning happens – for everyone, everywhere. Our vision is to ensure that everyone can achieve her or his full potential with access to a quality education and lifelong learning. To reach this, we are helping countries build foundational skills like literacy, numeracy, and socioemotional skills – the building blocks for all other learning. From early childhood to tertiary education and beyond – we help children and youth acquire the skills they need to thrive in school, the labor market and throughout their lives.

Investing in the world’s most precious resource – people – is paramount to ending poverty on a livable planet.  Our experience across more than 100 countries bears out this robust connection between human capital, quality of life, and economic growth: when countries strategically invest in people and the systems designed to protect and build human capital at scale, they unlock the wealth of nations and the potential of everyone.

Building on this, the World Bank supports resilient, equitable, and inclusive education systems that ensure learning happens for everyone. We do this by generating and disseminating evidence, ensuring alignment with policymaking processes, and bridging the gap between research and practice.

The World Bank is the largest source of external financing for education in developing countries, with a portfolio of about $26 billion in 94 countries including IBRD, IDA and Recipient-Executed Trust Funds. IDA operations comprise 62% of the education portfolio.

The investment in FCV settings has increased dramatically and now accounts for 26% of our portfolio.

World Bank projects reach at least 425 million students -one-third of students in low- and middle-income countries.

The World Bank’s Approach to Education

Five interrelated pillars of a well-functioning education system underpin the World Bank’s education policy approach:

• Learners are prepared and motivated to learn;
• Teachers are prepared, skilled, and motivated to facilitate learning and skills acquisition;
• Learning resources (including education technology) are available, relevant, and used to improve teaching and learning;
• Schools are safe and inclusive; and
• Education Systems are well-managed, with good implementation capacity and adequate financing.

The Bank is already helping governments design and implement cost-effective programs and tools to build these pillars.

Our Principles:

• We pursue systemic reform supported by political commitment to learning for all children. 
• We focus on equity and inclusion through a progressive path toward achieving universal access to quality education, including children and young adults in fragile or conflict affected areas , those in marginalized and rural communities,  girls and women , displaced populations,  students with disabilities , and other vulnerable groups.
• We focus on results and use evidence to keep improving policy by using metrics to guide improvements.   
• We want to ensure financial commitment commensurate with what is needed to provide basic services to all. 
• We invest wisely in technology so that education systems embrace and learn to harness technology to support their learning objectives.   

Laying the groundwork for the future

Country challenges vary, but there is a menu of options to build forward better, more resilient, and equitable education systems.

Countries are facing an education crisis that requires a two-pronged approach: first, supporting actions to recover lost time through remedial and accelerated learning; and, second, building on these investments for a more equitable, resilient, and effective system.

Recovering from the learning crisis must be a political priority, backed with adequate financing and the resolve to implement needed reforms.  Domestic financing for education over the last two years has not kept pace with the need to recover and accelerate learning. Across low- and lower-middle-income countries, the  average share of education in government budgets fell during the pandemic , and in 2022 it remained below 2019 levels.

The best chance for a better future is to invest in education and make sure each dollar is put toward improving learning.  In a time of fiscal pressure, protecting spending that yields long-run gains – like spending on education – will maximize impact.  We still need more and better funding for education.  Closing the learning gap will require increasing the level, efficiency, and equity of education spending—spending smarter is an imperative.

• Education technology  can be a powerful tool to implement these actions by supporting teachers, children, principals, and parents; expanding accessible digital learning platforms, including radio/ TV / Online learning resources; and using data to identify and help at-risk children, personalize learning, and improve service delivery.

Looking ahead

We must seize this opportunity  to reimagine education in bold ways. Together, we can build forward better more equitable, effective, and resilient education systems for the world’s children and youth.

Accelerating Improvements

Supporting countries in establishing time-bound learning targets and a focused education investment plan, outlining actions and investments geared to achieve these goals.

Launched in 2020, the  Accelerator Program  works with a set of countries to channel investments in education and to learn from each other. The program coordinates efforts across partners to ensure that the countries in the program show improvements in foundational skills at scale over the next three to five years. These investment plans build on the collective work of multiple partners, and leverage the latest evidence on what works, and how best to plan for implementation.  Countries such as Brazil (the state of Ceará) and Kenya have achieved dramatic reductions in learning poverty over the past decade at scale, providing useful lessons, even as they seek to build on their successes and address remaining and new challenges.  

Universalizing Foundational Literacy

Readying children for the future by supporting acquisition of foundational skills – which are the gateway to other skills and subjects.

The  Literacy Policy Package (LPP)   consists of interventions focused specifically on promoting acquisition of reading proficiency in primary school. These include assuring political and technical commitment to making all children literate; ensuring effective literacy instruction by supporting teachers; providing quality, age-appropriate books; teaching children first in the language they speak and understand best; and fostering children’s oral language abilities and love of books and reading.

Advancing skills through TVET and Tertiary

Ensuring that individuals have access to quality education and training opportunities and supporting links to employment.

Tertiary education and skills systems are a driver of major development agendas, including human capital, climate change, youth and women’s empowerment, and jobs and economic transformation. A comprehensive skill set to succeed in the 21st century labor market consists of foundational and higher order skills, socio-emotional skills, specialized skills, and digital skills. Yet most countries continue to struggle in delivering on the promise of skills development. 

The World Bank is supporting countries through efforts that address key challenges including improving access and completion, adaptability, quality, relevance, and efficiency of skills development programs. Our approach is via multiple channels including projects, global goods, as well as the Tertiary Education and Skills Program . Our recent reports including Building Better Formal TVET Systems and STEERing Tertiary Education provide a way forward for how to improve these critical systems.

Addressing Climate Change

Mainstreaming climate education and investing in green skills, research and innovation, and green infrastructure to spur climate action and foster better preparedness and resilience to climate shocks.

Our approach recognizes that education is critical for achieving effective, sustained climate action. At the same time, climate change is adversely impacting education outcomes. Investments in education can play a huge role in building climate resilience and advancing climate mitigation and adaptation. Climate change education gives young people greater awareness of climate risks and more access to tools and solutions for addressing these risks and managing related shocks. Technical and vocational education and training can also accelerate a green economic transformation by fostering green skills and innovation. Greening education infrastructure can help mitigate the impact of heat, pollution, and extreme weather on learning, while helping address climate change. 

Examples of this work are projects in Nigeria (life skills training for adolescent girls), Vietnam (fostering relevant scientific research) , and Bangladesh (constructing and retrofitting schools to serve as cyclone shelters).

Strengthening Measurement Systems

Enabling countries to gather and evaluate information on learning and its drivers more efficiently and effectively.

The World Bank supports initiatives to help countries effectively build and strengthen their measurement systems to facilitate evidence-based decision-making. Examples of this work include:

(1) The  Global Education Policy Dashboard (GEPD) : This tool offers a strong basis for identifying priorities for investment and policy reforms that are suited to each country context by focusing on the three dimensions of practices, policies, and politics.

• Highlights gaps between what the evidence suggests is effective in promoting learning and what is happening in practice in each system; and
• Allows governments to track progress as they act to close the gaps.

The GEPD has been implemented in 13 education systems already – Peru, Rwanda, Jordan, Ethiopia, Madagascar, Mozambique, Islamabad, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Sierra Leone, Niger, Gabon, Jordan and Chad – with more expected by the end of 2024.

(2)  Learning Assessment Platform (LeAP) : LeAP is a one-stop shop for knowledge, capacity-building tools, support for policy dialogue, and technical staff expertise to support student achievement measurement and national assessments for better learning.

Supporting Successful Teachers

Helping systems develop the right selection, incentives, and support to the professional development of teachers.

Currently, the World Bank Education Global Practice has over 160 active projects supporting over 18 million teachers worldwide, about a third of the teacher population in low- and middle-income countries. In 12 countries alone, these projects cover 16 million teachers, including all primary school teachers in Ethiopia and Turkey, and over 80% in Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Vietnam.

A World Bank-developed classroom observation tool, Teach, was designed to capture the quality of teaching in low- and middle-income countries. It is now 3.6 million students.

While Teach helps identify patterns in teacher performance, Coach leverages these insights to support teachers to improve their teaching practice through hands-on in-service teacher professional development (TPD).

Our recent report on Making Teacher Policy Work proposes a practical framework to uncover the black box of effective teacher policy and discusses the factors that enable their scalability and sustainability.

 Supporting Education Finance Systems

Strengthening country financing systems to mobilize resources for education and make better use of their investments in education.

Our approach is to bring together multi-sectoral expertise to engage with ministries of education and finance and other stakeholders to develop and implement effective and efficient public financial management systems; build capacity to monitor and evaluate education spending, identify financing bottlenecks, and develop interventions to strengthen financing systems; build the evidence base on global spending patterns and the magnitude and causes of spending inefficiencies; and develop diagnostic tools as public goods to support country efforts.

Working in Fragile, Conflict, and Violent (FCV) Contexts

The massive and growing global challenge of having so many children living in conflict and violent situations requires a response at the same scale and scope. Our education engagement in the Fragility, Conflict and Violence (FCV) context, which stands at US$5.35 billion, has grown rapidly in recent years, reflecting the ever-increasing importance of the FCV agenda in education. Indeed, these projects now account for more than 25% of the World Bank education portfolio.

Education is crucial to minimizing the effects of fragility and displacement on the welfare of youth and children in the short-term and preventing the emergence of violent conflict in the long-term. 

Support to Countries Throughout the Education Cycle

Our support to countries covers the entire learning cycle, to help shape resilient, equitable, and inclusive education systems that ensure learning happens for everyone. 

The ongoing  Supporting  Egypt  Education Reform project , 2018-2025, supports transformational reforms of the Egyptian education system, by improving teaching and learning conditions in public schools. The World Bank has invested $500 million in the project focused on increasing access to quality kindergarten, enhancing the capacity of teachers and education leaders, developing a reliable student assessment system, and introducing the use of modern technology for teaching and learning. Specifically, the share of Egyptian 10-year-old students, who could read and comprehend at the global minimum proficiency level, increased to 45 percent in 2021.

In  Nigeria , the $75 million  Edo  Basic Education Sector and Skills Transformation (EdoBESST)  project, running from 2020-2024, is focused on improving teaching and learning in basic education. Under the project, which covers 97 percent of schools in the state, there is a strong focus on incorporating digital technologies for teachers. They were equipped with handheld tablets with structured lesson plans for their classes. Their coaches use classroom observation tools to provide individualized feedback. Teacher absence has reduced drastically because of the initiative. Over 16,000 teachers were trained through the project, and the introduction of technology has also benefited students.

Through the $235 million  School Sector Development Program  in  Nepal  (2017-2022), the number of children staying in school until Grade 12 nearly tripled, and the number of out-of-school children fell by almost seven percent. During the pandemic, innovative approaches were needed to continue education. Mobile phone penetration is high in the country. More than four in five households in Nepal have mobile phones. The project supported an educational service that made it possible for children with phones to connect to local radio that broadcast learning programs.

From 2017-2023, the $50 million  Strengthening of State Universities  in  Chile  project has made strides to improve quality and equity at state universities. The project helped reduce dropout: the third-year dropout rate fell by almost 10 percent from 2018-2022, keeping more students in school.

The World Bank’s first  Program-for-Results financing in education  was through a $202 million project in  Tanzania , that ran from 2013-2021. The project linked funding to results and aimed to improve education quality. It helped build capacity, and enhanced effectiveness and efficiency in the education sector. Through the project, learning outcomes significantly improved alongside an unprecedented expansion of access to education for children in Tanzania. From 2013-2019, an additional 1.8 million students enrolled in primary schools. In 2019, the average reading speed for Grade 2 students rose to 22.3 words per minute, up from 17.3 in 2017. The project laid the foundation for the ongoing $500 million  BOOST project , which supports over 12 million children to enroll early, develop strong foundational skills, and complete a quality education.

The $40 million  Cambodia  Secondary Education Improvement project , which ran from 2017-2022, focused on strengthening school-based management, upgrading teacher qualifications, and building classrooms in Cambodia, to improve learning outcomes, and reduce student dropout at the secondary school level. The project has directly benefited almost 70,000 students in 100 target schools, and approximately 2,000 teachers and 600 school administrators received training.

The World Bank is co-financing the $152.80 million  Yemen  Restoring Education and Learning Emergency project , running from 2020-2024, which is implemented through UNICEF, WFP, and Save the Children. It is helping to maintain access to basic education for many students, improve learning conditions in schools, and is working to strengthen overall education sector capacity. In the time of crisis, the project is supporting teacher payments and teacher training, school meals, school infrastructure development, and the distribution of learning materials and school supplies. To date, almost 600,000 students have benefited from these interventions.

The $87 million  Providing an Education of Quality in  Haiti  project supported approximately 380 schools in the Southern region of Haiti from 2016-2023. Despite a highly challenging context of political instability and recurrent natural disasters, the project successfully supported access to education for students. The project provided textbooks, fresh meals, and teacher training support to 70,000 students, 3,000 teachers, and 300 school directors. It gave tuition waivers to 35,000 students in 118 non-public schools. The project also repaired 19 national schools damaged by the 2021 earthquake, which gave 5,500 students safe access to their schools again.

In 2013, just 5% of the poorest households in  Uzbekistan  had children enrolled in preschools. Thanks to the  Improving Pre-Primary and General Secondary Education Project , by July 2019, around 100,000 children will have benefitted from the half-day program in 2,420 rural kindergartens, comprising around 49% of all preschool educational institutions, or over 90% of rural kindergartens in the country.

In addition to working closely with governments in our client countries, the World Bank also works at the global, regional, and local levels with a range of technical partners, including foundations, non-profit organizations, bilaterals, and other multilateral organizations. Some examples of our most recent global partnerships include:

UNICEF, UNESCO, FCDO, USAID, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation:  Coalition for Foundational Learning

The World Bank is working closely with UNICEF, UNESCO, FCDO, USAID, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as the  Coalition for Foundational Learning  to advocate and provide technical support to ensure foundational learning.  The World Bank works with these partners to promote and endorse the  Commitment to Action on Foundational Learning , a global network of countries committed to halving the global share of children unable to read and understand a simple text by age 10 by 2030.

Australian Aid, Bernard van Leer Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Canada, Echida Giving, FCDO, German Cooperation, William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, Conrad Hilton Foundation, LEGO Foundation, Porticus, USAID: Early Learning Partnership

The Early Learning Partnership (ELP) is a multi-donor trust fund, housed at the World Bank.  ELP leverages World Bank strengths—a global presence, access to policymakers and strong technical analysis—to improve early learning opportunities and outcomes for young children around the world.

We help World Bank teams and countries get the information they need to make the case to invest in Early Childhood Development (ECD), design effective policies and deliver impactful programs. At the country level, ELP grants provide teams with resources for early seed investments that can generate large financial commitments through World Bank finance and government resources. At the global level, ELP research and special initiatives work to fill knowledge gaps, build capacity and generate public goods.

UNESCO, UNICEF:  Learning Data Compact

UNESCO, UNICEF, and the World Bank have joined forces to close the learning data gaps that still exist and that preclude many countries from monitoring the quality of their education systems and assessing if their students are learning. The three organizations have agreed to a  Learning Data Compact , a commitment to ensure that all countries, especially low-income countries, have at least one quality measure of learning by 2025, supporting coordinated efforts to strengthen national assessment systems.

UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS):   Learning Poverty Indicator

Aimed at measuring and urging attention to foundational literacy as a prerequisite to achieve SDG4, this partnership was launched in 2019 to help countries strengthen their learning assessment systems, better monitor what students are learning in internationally comparable ways and improve the breadth and quality of global data on education.

FCDO, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation:  EdTech Hub

Supported by the UK government’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), in partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the EdTech Hub is aimed at improving the quality of ed-tech investments. The Hub launched a rapid response Helpdesk service to provide just-in-time advisory support to 70 low- and middle-income countries planning education technology and remote learning initiatives.

MasterCard Foundation

Our Tertiary Education and Skills  global program, launched with support from the Mastercard Foundation, aims to prepare youth and adults for the future of work and society by improving access to relevant, quality, equitable reskilling and post-secondary education opportunities.  It is designed to reframe, reform, and rebuild tertiary education and skills systems for the digital and green transformation.

Bridging the AI divide: Breaking down barriers to ensure women’s leadership and participation in the Fifth Industrial Revolution

Common challenges and tailored solutions: How policymakers are strengthening early learning systems across the world

Compulsory education boosts learning outcomes and climate action

Areas of focus.

Data & Measurement

Early Childhood Development

Financing Education

Foundational Learning

Fragile, Conflict & Violent Contexts

Girls’ Education

Inclusive Education

Skills Development

Technology (EdTech)  

Tertiary Education

Initiatives

• Show More +
• Invest in Childcare
• Global Education Policy Dashboard
• Global Education Evidence Advisory Panel
• Show Less -

Collapse and Recovery: How the COVID-19 Pandemic Eroded Human Capital and What to Do About It

BROCHURES & FACT SHEETS

Flyer: Education Factsheet - May 2024

Publication: Realizing Education's Promise: A World Bank Retrospective – August 2023

Flyer: Education and Climate Change - November 2022

Brochure: Learning Losses - October 2022

STAY CONNECTED

Human Development Topics

Around the bank group.

Find out what the Bank Group's branches are doing in education

Global Education Newsletter - June 2024

What's happening in the World Bank Education Global Practice? Read to learn more.

Learning Can't Wait: A commitment to education in Latin America and the ...

A new IDB-World Bank report describes challenges and priorities to address the educational crisis.

Human Capital Project

The Human Capital Project is a global effort to accelerate more and better investments in people for greater equity and economic growth.

Impact Evaluations

Research that measures the impact of education policies to improve education in low and middle income countries.

Education Videos

Watch our latest videos featuring our projects across the world

Additional Resources

Skills & Workforce Development

Technology (EdTech)

This site uses cookies to optimize functionality and give you the best possible experience. If you continue to navigate this website beyond this page, cookies will be placed on your browser. To learn more about cookies, click here .

Essay on Education for School Students and Children

500+ words essay on education.

Education is an important tool which is very useful in everybody’s life. Education is what differentiates us from other living beings on earth. It makes man the smartest creature on earth. It empowers humans and gets them ready to face challenges of life efficiently. With that being said, education still remains a luxury and not a necessity in our country. Educational awareness needs to be spread through the country to make education accessible. But, this remains incomplete without first analyzing the importance of education. Only when the people realize what significance it holds, can they consider it a necessity for a good life. In this essay on Education, we will see the importance of education and how it is a doorway to success.

Importance of Education

Education is the most significant tool in eliminating poverty and unemployment . Moreover, it enhances the commercial scenario and benefits the country overall. So, the higher the level of education in a country, the better the chances of development are.

In addition, this education also benefits an individual in various ways. It helps a person take a better and informed decision with the use of their knowledge. This increases the success rate of a person in life.

Subsequently, education is also responsible for providing with an enhanced lifestyle. It gives you career opportunities that can increase your quality of life.

Similarly, education also helps in making a person independent. When one is educated enough, they won’t have to depend on anyone else for their livelihood. They will be self-sufficient to earn for themselves and lead a good life.

Above all, education also enhances the self-confidence of a person and makes them certain of things in life. When we talk from the countries viewpoint, even then education plays a significant role. Educated people vote for the better candidate of the country. This ensures the development and growth of a nation.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Doorway to Success

To say that education is your doorway to success would be an understatement. It serves as the key which will unlock numerous doors that will lead to success. This will, in turn, help you build a better life for yourself.

An educated person has a lot of job opportunities waiting for them on the other side of the door. They can choose from a variety of options and not be obligated to do something they dislike. Most importantly, education impacts our perception positively. It helps us choose the right path and look at things from various viewpoints rather than just one.

With education, you can enhance your productivity and complete a task better in comparison to an uneducated person. However, one must always ensure that education solely does not ensure success.

It is a doorway to success which requires hard work, dedication and more after which can you open it successfully. All of these things together will make you successful in life.

In conclusion, education makes you a better person and teaches you various skills. It enhances your intellect and the ability to make rational decisions. It enhances the individual growth of a person.

Education also improves the economic growth of a country . Above all, it aids in building a better society for the citizens of a country. It helps to destroy the darkness of ignorance and bring light to the world.

FAQs on Education

Q.1 Why is Education Important?

A.1 Education is important because it is responsible for the overall development of a person. It helps you acquire skills which are necessary for becoming successful in life.

Q.2 How does Education serve as a Doorway to Success?

A.2 Education is a doorway to success because it offers you job opportunities. Furthermore, it changes our perception of life and makes it better.

Customize your course in 30 seconds

Which class are you in.

• Travelling Essay
• Picnic Essay
• Our Country Essay
• My Parents Essay
• Essay on Favourite Personality
• Essay on Memorable Day of My Life
• Essay on Knowledge is Power
• Essay on Gurpurab
• Essay on My Favourite Season
• Essay on Types of Sports

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Download the App

Essay On The Importance Of Education

Introduction: Education is very important for every country. Education begins at home and continues throughout our life. There are many reasons why people need education. It helps them to learn new things, find good jobs and lead a respectable life in the society. The more educated a person the higher is the chances of her or his success in life. Education gives us knowledge of the world around us. It prepares us to face the world. It changes us for better and provides us with a perspective of life. When you are educated, you know when to speak and when to remain silent. The entire progress of the nation is dependent on her literacy rates. But unfortunately, education is not free of cost today. Education, for all, remains a distant dream.

Importance of Education: Everyone knows that education is very important for our life. With education, we can do lots of things. Education is the basic requirement nowadays for everything that we wish to do. If we need to work, our employers will ask about our education. When getting married, the bride or groom’s family will also ask our educational qualifications. To succeed in life and make money too, we need education.

Education is the foundation of the progress of a country. Let us see in detail below:

Education Alleviates Poverty – People who have necessary skills like reading, writing, and numerical skills have more opportunities than those who lack it. They can explore the world and find their purpose in life. Educated people are health conscious and are more productive in their work. With the right education, people do not get addicted to harmful drugs and alcohol.

Education can help people choose their desired skills and career paths. With high literacy rates, we can have happy and healthy citizens.

Education Reduces Crime Rates – Education can improve the law and order situation of a place. People are more aware of fraudulent practices and have the courage to fight against crooked people. They become reluctant in giving bribes and do not fall in the traps of cons and criminals.

Primary and secondary education, if made free and compulsory, can prevent lots of children from committing crimes such as robbery, rape, and murder. After completing school education, children who go to universities, have better employability scope, and will not consider crime as an option for survival. Thus, education plays a crucial role in making society safe and secure.

Education Reduces Inequality in Society – Our society was patriarchal in nature, and women were not allowed to earn money. Moreover, they did not have the right to own property and were utterly dependent on men. They were made helpless and often faced discrimination and oppression. But all these can change if women go to schools and colleges. They get to know about their rights and have the courage to fight for justice.

When women in low-income families go to work in industries, they get fewer wages as compared to men. Education can bring in the system where one has to pay equal wages for equal work.

Education is the only way to bust myths and superstitions – We live in a diverse world with a plethora of cultural and traditional norms. But sometimes our ancestral beliefs can ruin a person’s life. For example, some people are considered ill-fated right from birth. We have even grouped people as untouchables and denied them their fundamental rights. The illiterate people believe in miracles where a simple prayer can make a blind person see, a dumb person talks, and a lame person walk. They end up wasting precious money by following such myths. There are many fraudsters who take advantage of the ignorance of the people. Education promotes scientific reasons for the occurrence of all the events in the world. So educated people alone can quash the existing black market based on religion and faith.

Education can prevent wars and terrorism – Education sows the seed of hope in young minds. They imagine, dream, and proceed towards a brighter future. Education alone teaches us that waging wars could lead to nothing but a complete loss for everybody involved. Some lose their families, their youth, and their future in the name of protests and fights. Some innocent people lose their lives, their properties, and their loved ones too. A lot of natural resources are depleted in the name of war, and it is nothing but irreversible damage to Mother Nature by humankind. A sound education system can teach us ways to communicate and compromise. Knowing about all these losses through education; we can resolve our issues peacefully.

Education promotes health and hygiene – In primary schools, kids are taught about the significance of cleanliness and eating a balanced diet. We are also told about the advantages of recycling and reuse. We get to know about the scarcity of natural resources and the importance of conservation of nature and the environment. We make judicious choices in everyday life. Lessons on living in harmony with nature and keeping the environment pollution free, when applied practically, could improve the quality of air, water, and soil. It will also enhance the aesthetic beauty of the environment, and we will be able to attract more tourists.

Educational Sector and Problem: Meanwhile, modern-day education is something we are aware of. Other than some ancient practices, education nowadays is available from –

• Universities
• Military training institutes
• Places of worship
• Finishing schools
• Private tuitions
• Internet and online resources

Many people say that education and wealth are closely linked. This is not entirely true. Education does not merely mean a good degree of some great university. Education actually means how we see and perceive things. Above that, education also means how we respond or react to situations. Education from schools and colleges is important because it helps us how to live in a civilized society and respect one another. It shows us how to obey the laws of the society and laws of the land we dwell.

Problems – Education is not available free of cost in our country. We don’t have enough reforms in primary education that represents the grassroots level. Poor people cannot afford to pay high tuition fees in private schools. There is a lack of punctuality, discipline, and motivation among the teachers and management too. So the number of dropouts from schools keeps increasing. Such children end up working as laborers and remain in poverty for the rest of their lives. In order to progress as a nation, the government has to set right the condition of all primary schools in the country.

Conclusion: Nowadays, education is important because there are thousands of things around us that are made with modern technology. We require education to use these modern gadgets and get the best benefits of technology. Education also teaches us how to respect other human beings. It is because of education that every country has laws that tell people what can be done and what should be avoided.

My Favorite Personality My Mother

Walking in the Rain

Should Rapist be Sentenced to Death

The Spring in Bangladesh

Ethical Aspects of the Financial Crisis

Science and Fun Come Together In These Two Cool STEM Kits for Kids

Fukuchilite: Properties and Occurrences

Real Estate Transaction – transferring ownership of real property

Branding during Digital Marketing Strategy

Ross 154 – a star in the southern zodiac constellation of Sagittarius

Latest post.

Bismuth Hydroxide

Rubidium Fluoride (RbF)

A New approach could help Treat Severe Brain Tumors

Tumor-infiltrating Lymphocyte Therapy represents a breakthrough in Cancer Treatment

Rubidium Cyanide

Rubidium Chloride – a chemical compound

Watch Reimagine Education and learn what's new with responsible AI in education >

• Learning Accelerators
• Published Aug 22, 2024

Develop confident communicators: A guide to Speaker Progress for educators

• Content type
• Tips and guides
• Microsoft 365

Speaker Progress, a Learning Accelerator from Microsoft, helps educators develop students’ public speaking skills. Designed to accompany Speaker Coach, Speaker Progress enables you to create, customize, and assign speaking projects to your students, and collect insights about their performance over time. With AI-powered real-time coaching , Speaker Progress allows students to take ownership over their own communication skills development. Follow the steps below in our guide to Speaker Progress for educators and start using this innovative tool with your students.

Get started with Speaker Coach

Educator benefits:

• Streamline public speaking instruction and identify focus areas.
• Provide automatic, personalized feedback on qualities like pace, pitch, filler words, and more.
• Examine skill development over time for individuals, classes, grade or year levels, and schools.

Student benefits:

• Build confidence in public speaking through AI-powered real-time coaching.
• Offer a private space to practice and refine presentation delivery.
• Develop critical foundational and future-ready communication skills.

How to create a Speaker Progress assignment

Creating engaging speaking assignments for your students is quick and easy with Speaker Progress. All you need is a class in Microsoft Teams for Education to get started. Here’s how to set up your first assignment:

• Open Microsoft Teams for Education and go to Assignments in a class channel.
• Select Create .
• Select Learning Accelerators and then Speaker Progress .

Check out the Getting started with Speaker Progress for educators article from Microsoft Support for more details.

Tip: If you already have an assignment created, you can also add a Speaker Progress activity by selecting Learning Accelerators from the New assignment screen. This is helpful when you already have existing content that might benefit from a presentation practice session.

Customize the assignment

When you add a Speaker Progress assignment, you can customize how students practice their presentation. You determine important parameters like how much time is spent practicing, how many attempts can be made, and how students receive feedback.

To customize a Speaker Progress assignment:

• Choose an engaging Presentation title that reflects the assignment’s purpose. Consider using the name of the presentation that students will practice.
• Determine the Number of attempts a student can practice their presentation before submitting the assignment.
• Set the time limit that students can practice their presentation during each attempt. Time ranges are between 1-10 minutes.
• Decide if you want to Require video when students complete the assignment. If selected, a recording of the attempt is made with the student’s internal camera and shared with you when submitted. If you want to include body language feedback, you need to choose this option.
• Decide whether to release a rehearsal report to students at the end of each attempt. The rehearsal report contains AI-generated feedback on communication skills listed as strengths and opportunities for improvement.

Tip: The first time you create a Speaker Progress assignment, you’ll receive a short overview of what Speaker Progress is and how to use it. Take a moment to review the overview.

Choose feedback types

When you create the Speaker Progress assignment, you will be prompted to choose the aspects of public speaking that you want students to focus on while practicing. Speaker Progress uses AI to assess qualities like pitch, pace, and pronunciation to help evaluate students as they speak. Tips are provided in real time, helping learners make adjustments and overcome challenges in the moment. Simply toggle the switches next to the feedback types to learn more and apply them to the assignment.

You can select all the feedback types or choose from:

• Filler Words
• Pronunciation
• Inclusiveness
• Repetitive language
• Body language

Tip: Selecting feedback types allows you to create a personalized experience that targets the exact skills your students need to develop. You must select at least one to create the assignment, so take a moment to review the cards that appear on screen or check out Getting started with Speaker Progress for educators: What students are evaluated on .

Finalize and send the assignment

The last step before assigning practice to students involves finalizing the Speaker Progress assignment in Microsoft Teams for Education. Just like all other assignments in Microsoft Teams, you can adjust when it’s delivered, who should complete the assignment, and what additional resources to include. You can also add a point value for grading and include any directions for students. Check out the training course Organize content, create assignments, and assess learners’ understanding in Microsoft Teams if you need help completing any of the fields.

You might consider adding a rubric and a Microsoft Reflect check-in if this is your students’ first time using Speaker Progress. A rubric will clarify how you plan to evaluate their speaking skills, and a short Reflect check-in can provide you with insights on how students feel using Speaker Progress.

Foster well-being in the classroom

When you’re finished customizing the assignments, be sure to choose Assign .

Tip: Built-in AI in assignments can help you generate instructions and enrich your content. Get suggestions for adding more details, adding learning objectives, emphasizing key concepts, and even making your assignments more interesting. After the content is created, you can make further edits and updates as you go.

How students complete Speaker Progress assignments

When students receive a Speaker Progress assignment, they select the Speaker Progress link in the My work section. Students will be prompted to check their microphone and video settings before beginning their rehearsal. They can also view the time limit and number of attempts that you set up when creating the assignment.

What makes Speaker Progress assignments so beneficial is that students do not need an audience or someone to assess their speech. Students immediately receive AI-generated feedback when they start speaking. The feedback includes words of encouragement and coaching tips that appear as pop-ups on their computer screen. Students can mute this feedback if it’s distracting and opt to see it in the rehearsal report once they’re done practicing.

A bar above the recording lets learners know when they’re reaching the end of their session. If the assignment has a time limit, the bar changes to red to let students know they have 30 seconds remaining. When they’re finished, students select the stop button. The session automatically ends once the time limit expires. Learn more about the student experience in the support article Getting started with Speaker Progress for students .

Tip: For more accurate feedback, encourage students to find a quiet, distraction-free space to complete Speaker Progress assignments.

Review the rehearsal

When students finish rehearsing, they can choose to:

• Try again if you allowed more than one attempt when creating the Speaker Progress assignment. If learners try again, their current recording is erased and replaced with a new recording. Learners can’t recover and submit a previous recording.
• View the rehearsal report if you allowed students to review the report before grading and returning the assignment.
• Attach the recording to their assignment. If students are on their last try and viewing their report isn’t allowed, their last recorded attempt is automatically attached to their assignment.

The rehearsal report includes a breakdown of strengths and opportunities for improvement based on the AI feedback. Suggestions are designed to be actionable so students can immediately make changes to their delivery. Students can also re-watch their rehearsal by playing the recording and listening for feedback instances.

Tip: Directing students to re-watch a rehearsal and identify when they used filler words or repetitive language can help them take steps to improve their delivery.

Assess an assignment

When you open a student’s completed Speaker Progress assignment, you automatically receive the rehearsal report along with the rehearsal recording. If a student previously completed Speaker Progress assignments, the insights cards in the report include comparison data from their most recent assignment. A plus sign (+) indicates an increase in occurrences in a specific feedback type, and a minus sign (-) indicates a decline.

After reviewing the report and insights, you can use Speed Grader to share your feedback and assign a grade. Use the dropdown menu to Return the assignment to the student or Return for revision if students need to practice more.

Tip: Share a copy of the Speaker Progress Presentation Tips infographic with students so that they have a resource to reference when rehearsing or after you return a Speaker Progress assignment.

Speaker Progress is available for you to use with any age or subject area. Open Microsoft Teams for Education, create an assignment, and start helping students develop speaking skills. To learn more about Speaker Progress, take the Develop confident presenters with Speaker Progress training course on Microsoft Learn.

Related Posts

• Aug 10, 2023

How educators can use Speaker Coach to develop confident public speakers  

Explore new AI features in Learning Accelerators  

8 transformative tools to elevate project-based learning  

Ai in education brings opportunity to life.

Watch Reimagine Education

Connect with us on social

Subscribe to our newsletter

Stay up to date with monthly newsletters from Microsoft Education.  

School stories

Get inspired by stories from Microsoft Education customers.

Microsoft Learn Educator Center

Expand possibilities with educator training and professional development resources.

Contact sales

Connect with a Microsoft Education sales specialist to explore solutions for your school.

Discover a collection of resources to support a variety of educational topics.

Inflation Reduction Act and Medicare  Part D changes

• Introduction to Medicare
• Inflation Reduction Act Medicare Part D changes

What's different for prescription drug plans in 2025

With 45 years of experience you can count on, we understand that Medicare coverage is personal and changes to your coverage can affect your life. That's why UnitedHealthcare wants you to be aware of industry-wide changes to Medicare Part D prescription drug coverage in 2025 resulting from the Inflation Reduction Act. These changes aim to lower prescription costs for many members with Part D coverage, regardless of insurer. Even as regulations impact the entire Medicare industry next year, UnitedHealthcare is committed to delivering a plan that fits your needs.

Elimination of the Coverage Gap or Medicare Part D “donut hole”

In 2025, there are only three Part D prescription drug coverage stages: Deductible (depending on your plan), Initial Coverage and Catastrophic Coverage.

Lower maximum out-of-pocket drug costs

• In 2024, Medicare members were required to hit an $8,000 out-of-pocket maximum on prescription drug expenses before entering the Catastrophic Coverage stage. In 2025, this out-of-pocket maximum is now $2,000.

Important 2025 changes explained

Video transcript

0:00  Hello.

0:01  As a Medicare provider with over 45 years of experience,

0:05  you can count on, UnitedHealthcare understands that Medicare coverage

0:09  is personal and changes to your coverage can affect your life.

0:13  That's why we want to keep you in the know about some changes

0:15  brought by the federal government

0:17  impacting all standalone Medicare prescription drug plans

0:21  and Medicare Advantage plans with prescription drug coverage in 2025.

0:26  Let's get started.

0:27  We'll cover three big updates.

0:30  Removal of the coverage gap, a lower

0:32  maximum out-of-pocket amount for prescription drugs,

0:36  and a new prescription payment plan option.

0:41  First, good news. In 2025,

0:43  the coverage gap, also called the donut hole, has been removed.

0:47  There are now three Part D prescription drug coverage stages: an annual

0:52  deductible stage, initial coverage stage

0:56  and catastrophic coverage stage.

0:59  If a plan has a prescription drug deductible, members will be responsible

1:02  for paying the full cost of their drugs until they reach this amount.

1:07  Then, in the initial coverage stage, they will be responsible for paying copays

1:11  or co-insurance once the member and others on their behalf

1:15  have paid a combined total of $2,000 for Medicare covered medications,

1:20  including any amount toward the deductible.

1:22  The member moves straight into the catastrophic coverage stage

1:26  where they will pay $0 for Medicare covered Part D drugs

1:30  for the remainder of the plan year.

1:33  See more coverage.

1:35  No gap. In 2024,

1:38  for all Medicare members, no matter what insurance provider

1:40  they were enrolled with, the Part D out-of-pocket max

1:44  was $8,000. In 2025,

1:47  the out-of-pocket max is lower than ever.

1:50  Once a member and others on their behalf have paid a combined total of $2,000,

1:54  they'll pay nothing for Medicare covered Part D prescription drugs

1:58  for the rest of the plan year.

2:01  However, while the goal is to lower prescription drug expenses, these changes

2:05  could result in higher deductibles or premiums in 2025.

2:10  This means members may pay more earlier in the year during the deductible stage,

2:14  but could see an overall savings compared to prior years

2:18  with the lowered out-of-pocket maximum.

2:20  Also for 2025, there's a new optional program

2:24  called the Medicare Prescription Payment Plan.

2:27  Instead of paying all your out-of-pocket costs

2:30  when you fill your prescriptions at a network pharmacy,

2:33  you can spread these payments out over the plan year with monthly bills.

2:38  It's important to know this program does not lower prescription drug costs.

2:43  The payment amount may change each month until you reach the $2,000

2:47  out-of-pocket max.

2:48  So while monthly payments may be more manageable,

2:51  they may also be less predictable.

2:53  Your plan's sponsor may contact you if you're likely to benefit

2:57  from the program.

2:58  For any questions or to find the right UnitedHealthcare plan for you.

3:03  Chat with a Medicare plan expert live on

3:07  UHC.com/Medicare.

3:10 No matter the changes, UnitedHealthcare

3:12  offers reliable coverage you can count on for your whole life ahead.

Y0066_071524PartDVideo_C

Find the right Medicare plan for all your plans

Here's what you need to know, the new out-of-pocket maximum.

Lower maximum out-of-pocket drug costs.  

• While the goal is to lower prescription drug expenses, these changes could result in higher deductibles or premiums in 2025.

The removal of the Coverage Gap or Medicare Part D “donut hole”

• Depending on the plan, you'll pay your deductible, then copays and/or coinsurance in the Initial Coverage stage.
• Once you or others on your behalf reach the lower $2,000 out-of-pocket maximum in combined drug costs, you’ll enter the Catastrophic Coverage stage and stop paying out-of-pocket for covered prescriptions.
• Members not only pay no cost share once they reach the Catastrophic Coverage stage, but some may also reach the Catastrophic Coverage stage much sooner.

The Medicare Prescription Payment Plan

More flexibility for drug payments.  

• Medicare members with Part D coverage can spread their prescription drug out-of-pocket costs into monthly payments over the course of the plan year.
• Costs are billed by your insurer.
• This program can be valuable for members with high drug costs at the start of the plan year, but payments are subject to change each month.
• Enrollment is voluntary, and you will need to opt in through your plan provider.  

Learn more 

How IRA changes may impact Medicare members

Depending on your drugs, members with Part D coverage may experience these updates differently. While they aim to benefit many Medicare members by lowering prescription drug expenses, these changes could result in higher deductibles or premiums in 2025.

Additional resources and materials

Explore articles and FAQs for more in-depth information about Medicare Part D coverage, so you can make confident decisions about your health insurance coverage.

Inflation Reduction Act FAQs

Answers to frequently asked questions regarding industry-wide changes to Medicare Part D prescription drug coverage resulting from the Inflation Reduction Act.

How does the Inflation Reduction Act affect Medicare?

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) is a federal law that makes improvements to the Medicare program. Among other things, the IRA will expand Medicare benefits and help reduce Medicare members’ out-of-pocket costs for prescription drugs.

DC Public Schools

Dc agency top menu.

• Français
• Español

Search form

• DCPS School Profiles
• Printable School Directory
• Locate Your Boundary School
• Boundaries and Feeder Planning
• 2023 Boundary Study
• School Data
• School Leadership
• Teachers & Educators
• DCPS Accolades
• Visit Our Schools
• Continuous Education Plan
• DCPS Connected Schools
• Modernization Projects
• School Calendars
• Sustainable Schools
• Technology at DCPS
• Academic Programs
• College and Career Programs
• Dual Language
• Early Learning
• Elementary School
• High School
• Middle School
• Special Education
• Student Assessment
• District-Wide Summer Programs
• Guide to Curriculum at DCPS
• Pre-K to Graduation Policies
• Empowerment & Support
• Afterschool Programs
• Community Service
• Health & Wellness
• School Mental Health
• Food and Nutrition
• Student Safety
• Chancellor’s Student Advisory Board
• Kids Ride Free on Rail Program
• School Counseling
• Student Attendance & Support
• Student Concerns
• Student Placement
• Restorative Practices
• Chancellor’s Parent Advisory Board
• Local School Advisory Teams
• Parent Organizations
• Parent Resources
• Community Action Team
• School Partners
• Make a Donation
• Stay Informed
• Give Us Feedback
• District Knowledge Network
• About Title IX
• Community Engagement
• Family Engagement
• Language Access for Families
• Office of Integrity
• Parent University
• Parent/Visitor Concerns
• Volunteer in Our Schools
• Organization
• Strategic Plan
• Budget and Finance
• Core Leadership Team
• DCPS Policies
• Doing Business with DCPS
• Press Center
• Open Government and FOIA
• Career Opportunities
• Human Resources
• Frequently Used Links
• Inclement Weather Guidance
• Internships

2023 Boundary and Student Assignment Study

In 2023-2024, the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Education (DME) conducted a comprehensive review of District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) boundaries and feeder patterns and public school student assignment policies in accordance with the Attendance Zone Boundaries Act of 2013. This review focused on solving current and anticipated future challenges relating to clear rights, adequate capacity, and equitable access to public schools for the next 10 years. 

The process culminated in a series of recommendations made by the DC Advisory Committee on Student Assignment. In June 2024, Mayor Muriel Bowser approved the recommendations. DCPS will continue to work on implementation of the recommendations that directly impact or are owned by DCPS. Updates will be posted to this page on a rolling basis.  

Read the report with final recommendations.  

Read the Mayor's approval of the Advisory Committee's recommendations.  

BYU Education Week: Elder Andersen speaks of ‘profoundly important’ topic — ‘The educating of our righteous desires’

The savior’s ‘incomparable example of aligning his will with the will of the father brings us a beautiful vision of our way forward’.

By Rachel Sterzer Gibson

PROVO, Utah — Elder Neil L. Andersen ’s topic for the keynote address during BYU Education Week was “profoundly important,” said the member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, “and at the foundation of how we choose to live our lives.”

Elder Andersen quoted the late Church President Joseph F. Smith, saying, “The education ... of our desires is one of far-reaching importance to our happiness in life.”

Noting the theme of Education Week found in Romans 12:2 — “Be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind”— Elder Andersen said his theme addresses “one of the deepest parts of renewal.”

His subject? “The educating of our righteous desires.”

With conferencegoers filling the Marriott Center to the topmost rows on Tuesday, Aug. 20, Elder Andersen not only discussed the importance of educating one’s desires but also offered counsel and promises and testified of the One who provided the perfect example of aligning desires with Heavenly Father — the Savior Jesus Christ.

“While our struggles can in no way imaginable be measured against [the Savior], His incomparable example of aligning His will with the will of the Father brings us a beautiful vision of our way forward,” Elder Andersen testified.

The importance of righteous desires

The Lord speaks thoughtfully about individuals’ desires, Elder Andersen said, sharing Doctrine and Covenants 137:9 : “I, the Lord, will judge all men according to their works, according to the desire of their hearts.”

Desire is initiated by one’s own will and agency, he continued.

Elder Andersen recalled being a mission president 30 years ago and listening to the late Elder Neal A. Maxwell of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles respond to a missionary’s question about creating a desire in those he was teaching. “You can build upon his desire,” said Elder Maxwell of one learning about the gospel, “but he alone must initiate the desire.”

Elder Andersen invited listeners to consider two questions: “What are your most deeply held righteous desires?” and “How are you educating your righteous desires?”

Those righteous desires come in many shapes and sizes, he noted, but may include:

1. “You desire to be worthy to live eternally with our Heavenly Father, recognizing that it is only through the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ that you might have this eternal blessing.

2. “You desire to live forever with your eternal companion. For those not yet married, you desire a righteous eternal companion.

3. “You desire to help as much as possible your children, grandchildren and posterity to desire to live worthy of these same blessings. …

4. “You desire to contribute all you are able to the strength and purity of the kingdom of God upon the earth.

5. “You desire to live the Lord’s laws of happiness.”

How to educate righteous desires

There are two forces that educate righteous desires. On the one hand are the effort of mind and will or one’s choices and sincerity, real intent, courage and willpower. “This is our contribution to the equation.”

On the other hand are the gifts and grace of Heavenly Father. “These two powerful forces combine into the cauldron of time and patience. Our road to becoming is more than a marathon; it is the journey of a lifetime … and beyond,” Elder Andersen said.

Individuals can enjoy good things in mortality — like the thrill of a BYU football game — without allowing inconsequential things to detract from the most important inner desires.

President Dallin H. Oaks , first counselor in the First Presidency, has taught, “The Final Judgment is not just an evaluation of a sum total of good and evil acts — what we have done. It is based on the final effect of our acts and thoughts — what we have become.” Elder Andersen added, “Can you see our desires here?”

The process of refining, purifying and educating righteous desires requires time and patience. “Through the joys and challenges of mortality, we seek to better know and understand our Heavenly Father’s desires for us. Then step by step, year by year, through His grace and our will, our desires become one with His,” Elder Andersen said.

There will always be obstacles that seem to get in the way — “the enticing calls of the world, the ordinariness of life, the unexpected challenges that seem to come out of nowhere, the imperfections we see in ourselves and in our fellow Saints. It is our test to educate and grow our righteous desires as the difficulties and the disappointments attempt to upend us. The overarching grace of Christ combined with our resolute righteous desires allows us to become the eternal being we so want to become,” Elder Andersen said.

The role of covenants in educating righteous desires

Elder Andersen told listeners that he had prayed to know what specific counsel to share that could help them better educate their righteous desires. Prayer, scripture study, the sacrament, following the words of God’s prophets and service to others are all important. “But I have felt impressed to speak to you today about the covenants that we make in the holy endowment in the temple.”

The most important knowledge and direction a person can receive comes from God, Elder Andersen taught. “One of the most powerful places to feel the answers we seek and to shape our righteous desires is within the house of the Lord. When the impressions come to us in His holy house, the direction is without compulsion or cultural pressure, they are not from well-meaning friends or family. It is the Lord speaking to us through His Spirit.”

Heavenly Father knows each individual’s heart and spirit, strengths and weaknesses, anxieties, hopes, longings and fears. “He knows your private struggles, and He knows your faith. Nothing about you is a mystery or a surprise to Him. The Lord’s revelation, which may come without explanation, is His truth, especially for you, His encouragement and comfort to you, His correction of you, His love for you.”

The Lord will teach each of His children in the temple, Elder Andersen promised. “Elder Neal A. Maxwell taught, ‘The submission of one’s will is really the only uniquely personal thing we have to place on God’s altar.’ In the temple, we come humbly ready to receive His instruction and to align our desires with His.”

In the house of the Lord, a quiet and holy place, protected from the outside world, individuals can open their hearts and silently plead for heaven’s influence — Heavenly Father’s answers — to their righteous desires.

“Remember President Nelson’s powerful promise in speaking of the temple, ‘Nothing will open the heavens more. Nothing!’”

Elder Andersen then promised, “As you thoughtfully prepare to enter the Lord’s house, with willing hearts, awaiting the Lord’s direction, you will receive the lifting power to educate your desires and strengthen you in your desire to become.”

The example of the Savior

The most important example of aligning one’s desires with the will of the Father is the Savior, Jesus Christ, Elder Andersen taught. “He began in the premortal council, ‘Father, thy will be done, and the glory be thine forever’ ( Moses 4:2 ). His final words uttered on the cross, ‘Father, it is finished, thy will is done’” ( Matthew 27:54 Joseph Smith Translation).

Elder Andersen continued, “Between these two solemn, sacred, eternity-altering events, He lived a perfect life — a life without sin. He taught us how to live. He became our Savior and Redeemer. The daunting details of Gethsemane reveal the Savior’s absolute and complete willingness to submit His desires to those of the Father.”

In Gethsemane, Jesus pleaded, “O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me.”

But in humility, the Son concluded, “nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt” ( Matthew 26:39 ).

“Can we learn from Him?” Elder Andersen asked.

Jesus told Peter, James and John, “The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak” ( Matthew 26:41 ).

Said Elder Andersen, “This is the constant struggle we face with our own righteous desires. We, too, are to find in our spirit the strength to overcome the pulls of mortality, to become one with our Heavenly Father.”

In conclusion, Elder Andersen testified: “We can shape our desires. We can educate our desires. We can, through patience and time, become more than we are. We can become in alignment with our Savior and our Heavenly Father.”