Counting What Counts: Reframing Education Outcomes (A Research-Based Look at the Traits and Skills that Contribute to School and Life Successes)

Overemphasizing test scores as measures of achievement is potentially harmful to education. The contributors identify key traits such as mindset, motivation, social skills, creativity, and entrepreneurial spirit that students, teachers, and schools need to acknowledge and cultivate. Educators are asked to shift the evaluation paradigm to focus on a multiplicity of skills necessary for success in the 21st century.

Benefits:

• Examine the problems with current measures of students' skills, including why tests have great limitations as a means of measuring human qualities.
• Review the crucial role of personality traits in academic and lifelong achievement.
• Learn how motivational factors interact with each other and the impact they may have for educational evaluation.
• Discover the importance of and how to measure global competence.
• Appraise strategies for improving school climates.
• Explore nonacademic qualities valuable to long-term educational outcomes.

Contents:
Introduction: The Danger of Misguiding Outcomes: Lessons From Easter Island
Chapter 1: Numbers Can Lie: The Meaning and Limitations of Test Scores
Chapter 2: Celebrity for Nothing: The Rise of the Undervalued
Chapter 3: Personal Matter: Personality Traits
Chapter 4: Dreams and Nightmares: Motivational Factors
Chapter 5: The Makers: Creativity and Entrepreneurial Spirit
Chapter 6: Globally Speaking: Global Competence
Chapter 7: Friends and Enemies: Social Network and Social Capital
Chapter 8: Nature via Nurture: Developing Nonacademic Skills
Chapter 9: Shifting the Paradigm: Assessing What Matters
Index

The Editor Yong Zhao, PhD, is presidential chair and director of the Institute for Global and Online Education in the College of Education at the University of Oregon and a professor in the Department of Educational Measurement, Policy, and Leadership. He is also a Professorial Fellow with the Mitchell Institute for Health and Education Policy, Victoria University in Australia. He was previously University Distinguished Professor in the College of Education at Michigan State University, where he was founding director of the Office of Teaching and Technology and the US-China Center for Research on Educational Excellence, and executive director of the Confucius Institute. He is an elected fellow of the International Academy for Education.

Dr. Zhao is an internationally known scholar, author, and speaker whose works focus on the implications of globalization and technology on education. He has designed schools that cultivate global competence, developed computer games for language learning, and founded research and development institutions to explore innovative education models. The author of more than one hundred articles and twenty books, he was named one of the ten most influential people in educational technology in 2012 by the journal Tech & Learning.

Dr. Zhao received a BA in English language education from Sichuan Institute of Foreign Languages in Chongqing, China, and an MA and PhD in education from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.