Benchmarking Frameworks for International Schools in the UAE and KSA: A Strategic Approach to Effective Benchmarking
A Strategic Approach to Effective Benchmarking for the UAE and KSA
Benchmarking initiatives are critical in education, particularly in international private schools that offer an American or British curriculum. Crucial for the improvement in the quality of education, a quality benchmark can guide schools to focus on the best practices and ultimately lead them to guarantee a better quality of teaching and learning. Several assessment frameworks exist for national and international curricula, which can be used to offer valuable benchmarking opportunities. Benchmarking at private international schools can offer a powerful tool to improve learning outcomes and the quality of education.
Benchmarking can motivate schools for improvement projects, including better governance, teaching and learning, research, administration, and decision-making, therefore leading to success in achieving intended goals and objectives. Effective benchmarking empowers educational institutions to evaluate their administrative services. Depending on the outcome, they can identify areas for further development and thus improve their service offerings by exceeding the expectations of students in international schools. Collaboration, as one of the elements of benchmarking, involves schools working effectively and efficiently together. However, collaboration may have several concepts, including elements of accountability, competitive objectives, shared resources and information, vision, and collegial support to promote team and teacher development, which would be most relevant to describing collaboration in the context of benchmarking. The market of international schools is entering a period of unprecedented globalization in education, and new global assessments are likely to be influential in terms of the nature of educational provision. If individual schools are to maintain high-quality educational provision and student achievement, especially in institutions within an international setting, international and national benchmarking will provide potential tools seeking possible solutions.
In today’s educational landscape, especially within the rapidly developing MENA region, benchmarking plays a pivotal role in ensuring that schools align with global standards and cater to their unique student populations. This series of articles will introduce two specific benchmarking frameworks that have been tailored for international schools in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the Kingdom Saudi Arabia (KSA). These frameworks were designed by Dr. Chassie Selouane and are in line with the UAE School Inspection Framework and Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 education goals, with an emphasis on leveraging digital tools like Edmentum Exact Path to enhance educational outcomes.
The Role of Digital Tools in Enhancing Educational Outcomes
The attention to digital tools in the learning process is growing fast in view of their effects on educational outputs in various settings. The use of digital tools in education is omnipresent. They are widely integrated into educations processes to accompany and support effective and appropriate assessment procedures that contribute to diagnosing learning outcomes of individuals. The affordances of digital tools have been discussed across vivid regular debates, which include but are not limited to the consequences of integrating them in educational settings. This starts from promoting learner-centered environments that provide experiences tailored to suit the needs and interests of individual students—promoting student engagement, enthusiasm, and motivation by enhancing the learning activities and promoting students' active participation—to improve and make learning and teaching resources and tools engaging, appealing, portable, applicable, traceable, and easily accessible.
Consequently, integrating such digital resources in educational settings has a considerable impact on improving the effectiveness of available mechanisms of assessment and evaluation, including improving the efficiency, construct validity, and reliability of tests and instruments of assessment, aligning well with learning objectives and providing meaningful feedback to students about their performance. The integration and leverage of digital resources in educational systems and processes are often based on successful implementation strategies that require crosscutting collaboration from all stakeholders, including content developers, ministry experts, teachers, students, and informatics specialists, in order to develop and use the tools. All educational institutions need to consider adopting policies, capacity building, and training programs for educational content developers, as well as buying and generating electronic equipment and software in order to shift from face-to-face to digital exams.
However, it is important to note that this digital shift in assessments is a global tendency; therefore, societies and countries need policies and resources to invest in overcoming the challenge of promoting active engagement with open and flexible online items, ensuring equitable access for all students regardless of their level of poverty and avoiding technical problems such as loss of connectivity, data privacy, and device access. Certainly, the shift to digital exams requires enormous investment in infrastructure. Children are among the most important human resources employed in the digital transformation process, and their education is directly linked to their future careers that will require a package of 4Cs: creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, and competencies in the digital realm. However, not all countries and societies are capable of delivering these competencies equally, as digital access and digital literacy can be challenging in many cases, and digital tools are part and parcel of the learning processes in many educational curricula. Digital learning apps have been picked up as a focal point of several governmental initiatives as part of national investments in infrastructure.
Case Study: Exact Path
Exact Path is one of the digital platforms developed and offered by Edmentum. It is designed to help students advance and close gaps in learning in grades four to eight by predicting outcomes for teachers and delivering individualized learning paths based on assessments. Exact Path can be used as a tool for identification and support of multilingual learners (MLLs) in terms of the academic language of the students. The Exact Path adaptive assessments are designed to quantify a student's growth in the knowledge and skills underpinning mathematics, reading, and language arts. As students advance through the assessment, results are used to develop personalized learning paths that are based on individual student performance data. Learners have taken millions of assessments, and on average, students improve one grade level of performance in targeted areas in at least six weeks. Additionally, students who answer English-language items are typically able to advance one proficiency level on standardized tests for MLL development in one school year. Through the administration of individualized learning paths, the precise summative assessments become formative as the site progresses.
In addition to academic gearing and potential progress, an emphasis is placed on student work with the platform as potentially experiential for educators and MLLs. Four primary outcomes are hypothesized for students using Exact Path, three of which are for academic achievement: to increase educational attainment in mathematics, close gaps in learning, and increase progress within a specific year. The fourth outcome is of an affective nature, looking at student "experience" with the platform rather than the learning content per se, to impact motivation and well-being in language learning. Exact Path intentionally aligns with research on personalized learning and language-learning motivation. A balancing act is required to promote learning outcomes for students, while content and item writing must be geared, yet still present language development in challenging and motivating ways. In terms of its prototype, qualitative feedback shows that the platform is motivational, a good indicator of a more positive impact on student engagement.
To continue reading:
- Benchmarking Framework for International Schools in the UAE: Using the UAE School Inspection Framework: Discover how the UAE School Inspection Framework elevates international school standards through aligned assessments, MLL support, and personalized tools like Exact Path.
About the Author
Chassie Selouane, the vice chairperson of the board of governors of Copperstone Education, is an Indigenous American educational disruptor from North Carolina. She has been an educator for 23 years throughout the U.S. and the MENA region. Chassie is the founder/CEO of Appalachian American Academy Morocco, a virtual American curriculum school in Morocco, and principal at MLS Riyadh. She is the chairperson of the steering committee of the GCC ASCD Connected Community and the chairperson of the steering committee of the Education Experts conference series. She is also an advisory council member of AIELOC and a mentor for GLEAC.