11 February 2020

By IOE Events

The debates are back for 2020 and this time we took a look at the teenage years, asking What if… the world really did revolve around teenagers?. 

As far back as Socrates, adolescents were marked out and criticized by their elders for having bad manners, and ever since ‘the teenager’ rose to prominence in the 1950s the difficulty of adolescence has been a common trope, not to mention a source of amusement in popular culture.

That’s not the whole story, of course, and Greta Thunberg provides just one prominent, contemporary example of teens as a force for social awareness and change (we celebrated some others here).

Nevertheless, adolescence is a distinctive time that brings its own challenges. We wanted to examine what lies behind that and what could/should be done to ameliorate it.

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John Jerrim.

The PISA study is usually used to measure educational achievement across countries.

However, as well as taking a two hour test covering reading, science and mathematics, young people are also asked to complete a background questionnaire.

This covers a wide range of topics, such as self-confidence, life satisfaction, expectations for the future and out-of-school activities. There is hence a whole host of things – outside of educational achievement – that PISA allows us to compare across the world. 

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