The results of the 2018 International Computer and Information Literacy Study (ICILS), published yesterday, have revealed that the performance of Luxembourgish schools was below average compared to other participating countries.
Organised by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), ICILS evaluates computer literacy and numeracy skills among 14-year-old students. Indeed, the development of digital skills, and in particular coding and computational thinking, has become an essential mission of 21st-century schools that want to prepare effectively young people for their professional future.
In September 2019, Luxembourg's Minister of Education, Claude Meisch, announced that these two key skills will be systematically anchored in the teaching of public schools in the Grand Duchy. In primary education, coding will be taught from 2020-2021 in Cycle 4 mathematics classes and then from 2021-2022 in Cycles 1 to 3 across the board. Teachers will receive training and will be accompanied by the teachers specialised in digital skills, who will be recruited in 2020. In secondary education, computer science, including coding and computational thinking, will be integrated as a new discipline in the class schedule for younger students in 2021-2022.
The ICILS 2018 analysed precisely the competences that Luxembourg intends to introduce in primary and secondary education programmes in the coming years. However, these areas have not yet been explicitly taught in the Luxembourg school system. Consequently, the average score of Luxembourgish schools was below the average of countries participating in the study. These results should thus be interpreted with caution, since students were not prepared for the type of tests in this study.
Nevertheless, the Ministry of Education chose to participate in the ICILS 2018 study to give itself a measurable benchmark of the real skills of students in 2018 in order to monitor performance over time. Participation in the ICILS 2023 study will assess the impact of the Luxembourg Government's efforts to integrate these skills into the national curriculum.
The results of the ICILS 2018 study can be viewed in the international report published by the IEA at https://www.iea.nl/studies/iea/icils/2018.
