ESD and assessing the quality of education and learning

Abstract

Education is an essential component of three global development agendas, Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), Education for All (EFA) and the forthcoming Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It is argued that focus on the quality and relevance of education can assist in the current process of renewing the three agendas. During the last decade, ESD-based approaches and initiatives have shown to be able to produce quality learning outcomes, in formal school systems and other learning settings. Two examples of effective ESD-inspired initiatives with teacher educators in Southern Africa and with multistakeholder city team in Southern Asia are described and their essential transformational features identified. Proposals by the Learning Metrics Task Force (LMTF) are an attempt at being more responsive to the quality dimension of education by broadening learning domains. However, high-stakes (international) testing instruments are not necessarily aligned with the needs of relevant and quality education. The transformational ESD features show what can be done to make educational testing and assessment more inclusive, appropriate and useful.