Innovation in der digitalen Bildungslandschaft
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Berlin/Paris. 21. August 2025 Mario Piacentini is a social scientist with more than 15 years of experience in designing measurement frameworks and indicators. Since joining the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in 2009, he has led the development of PISA’s innovative assessments of transversal, 21st century skills and has coordinated the PISA Research, Development and Innovation (RDI) programme. He is dedicated to advancing the validity of measures for 21st century skills and driving innovation in the design of both large-scale and formative assessments.
Das Interview mit Mario Piacentini
Hello Mario, we are happy to have you!
Thank you for the invitation.
You have been with the OECD for many years now. How did that come to be? How did you end up in the role you have today?
My background was research in economics, on topics like education andmigration… I was always interested in how economics can help us understand human decisions and social networks. Then I ended up at the OECD a bit randomly. I was working at the World Bank when I saw an application for the OECD’s Young Professional Program, only two hours before the deadline. I applied. My whole career at the OECD has been a long exercise in trying to measure things that are difficult to measure. I found my passion in that. My first project was defining where cities end – literally measuring the borders of cities. That was my first challenge. From there I worked on many other projects: on gender-based violence, entrepreneurship, the value of unpaid work, all of them quite difficult to measure. I really found my calling in trying to solve these kinds of problems. It takes some creativity, too – starting from very limited data and producing something reliable and meaningful.
Then PISA came along. It was an opportunity, because it is one of the few places at the OECD where you can actually create your own data, thanks to the help of circa 90 national teams working with you. You have an idea, a question, and you can build data around it. As I said, I was curious about measurement, and I wondered whether we were really doing the right thing by producing these rankings of education systems – and whether the rankings were fair. For someone interested in measurement, that was a very appealing challenge.
And now, ten years later, I’m still trying to measure things that education and assessment systems usually don’t measure.
And with great success, I would say. PISA is one of the few large-scale education studies that has really entered political and societal discourse. I think that makes it particularly attractive, but it also means it draws a lot of scrutiny. Are you proud of that? Or is it more of a burden?
I see it mostly as a responsibility. That’s where measurement work becomes complicated. Measurement is not just about producing indicators – it’s also about communication. The work doesn’t end when the numbers are published. It continues through helping people understand and interpret the results correctly. It’s always a communication exercise – people need to understand what the data fairly show, and what the limitations are. That’s a big responsibility, and yes, sometimes a source of stress.
PISA is widely used, and it is a tool that is very easy to misuse.. That said, the rankings, if used productively, can serve as a wake-up call. That’s the good use: When policymakers see that their system is not performing as well as expected, they identify gaps, and they invest more in education. But there are many misuses, like assigning blame for a score decrease to a policymakers for a given policy without understanding that scores depend on so many factors, including culture, and are slow to change.
Another challenge is helping people understand that PISA is cross-sectional. You can see relationships – for example, between use of digital resources and performance – but those are not causal. People often see a chart showing that performance declines as digital use increases and conclude that “digitality is bad for education.” Such a simplistic interpretation is wrong. But then there remains a level of responsibility on our side, on my side, because this shows that the message was not communicated well enough. We are in the media market, like any other organization. Sometimes you simplify to make the message more digestible, but that can come at the cost of being true to the data.
And expecting very high levels of statistical literacy from everyone seems unrealistic, too… But this brings me to another kind of skill, which you measured in the latest PISA cycle (Volume III): creativity. Measuring what students know and can do is already hard – and creativity seems even harder, even more unusual to try to measure. Do you think standardized assessments like PISA can and should measure these less tangible skills? Are we underestimating what large-scale assessments can do?
That’s a big motivation behind my work. I’ve always asked whether we really characterize what makes a good education system. The power of PISA – and of assessment more broadly – is that it makes explicit what we value. As long as we do not assess creativity and other hard-to-measure skills, we implicitly say they are less important. The message to education ministers is: your main job is math, reading, science. If students happen to be creative – that is nice, but not your responsibility.
But we all know intuitively that what really matters is whether students can solve real-world problems, create solutions, express imagination, collaborate. These are essential at work and in life. If we don’t nurture these skills, we’re failing students. That’s why it was important, even within a large-scale assessment like PISA, to at least attempt to measure creative thinking. We showed that you can produce reliable, comparable scores of how well students generate ideas and reflect on them. That sends a powerful message: creativity matters. It’s similar to what we did in 2018, saying: citizenship education matters. That influenced curriculum design.
We could list 180 or more important skills: communication, empathy, critical thinking. We can’t develop assessments for all of them. But one practical step is to change how we assess core disciplines – creating question types that require not only topic knowledge but also creative thinking, critical evaluation, persistence. . Even within math or science, we can ask students to reflect on unfamiliar scenarios, develop hypotheses, create their own solutions.
Would you say these alternative approaches (focusing less on knowledge reproduction and more on engagement) could also be applied to everyday classroom assessments? Especially now, with tools like ChatGPT, which challenge traditional testing?
Definitely. That’s one of the points I care about – that classroom assessments and large-scale assessments should be coherent, inspired by the same idea of good learning. If you keep assessing knowledge the way it was done in the past, the only solution is to ban AI. That is not ideal. A better alternative is to raise the cognitive demand of tasks. Allow students to use AI, but require them in addition to demonstrate engagement and independent thought, for example by defending arguments in class, presenting research, participating in discussions. That is the biggest risk of AI usage in an educational setting: that students delegate the research and knowledge production to an AI instead of tackling the task themselves – and thus stop engaging deeply with the topics. That is why I think we should create a hybrid model where students sometimes use AI, and sometimes they don’t. That way they experience when it helps and when it doesn’t. It is comparable to calculators: you can allow them, but then give harder problems that require more than just calculations. We still need to design this model and train teachers for this task – but it is better than the alternatives of banning or ignoring AI.
You mentioned cognitive offloading. Do you think that this is the main risk of AI in education? And does it threaten creativity by dulling cognitive stimulation?
I do worry about it, I think it is a real risk. AI is very convenient, and students often discover it on their own without being taught about its limitations. Many see it as “superhuman”, a tool that can do everything – and that does it very well. That is why AI literacy is critical – understanding when and how to use it, and when to rely on yourself. We recently spoke with a group of 14-year-olds in a school in Austria. They did not really know how a Large Language Model worked, that it can be biased or produce hallucinations. But they were very aware of the effects it had! They said: “If we use AI for everything, we will not be ready for exams where we can’t use it.” That shows self-awareness, they knew what cognitive offloading looks like without having the terminology for it. Children should understand that AI is a powerful tool, but it does not replace learning core skills like calculating something in your head, writing and summarizing texts, etc. These skills must be practiced, otherwise children will not reach their full potential and become dependent on the help of an AI. I truly believe, human-AI complementarity is the way to go.
Who is responsible for teaching this? Teachers are already overloaded. Are parents, school leaders, or others part of this?
Unfortunately, it falls mostly to teachers–but they need support. The solution is hybrid experiences, where students keep switching between AI and non-AI tasks, experiencing when it works and when it doesn’t. Ministries, teacher training institutions, international organizations, and private resource providers all need to help create these experiences and examples, so teachers know how to implement them.
That relates to the Vodafone Foundation’s idea of successful education in the digital age. How would you define successful education in a “culture of digitality”?
For me, the ultimate goal of education is helping students learn to make good decisions. That includes knowing when to use digital tools and when not to. It means understanding that digital tools can augment your capacity, but you still need to define the problem, set the parameters, and own the creative idea. Successful education cultivates creativity, self-regulation, critical thinking, curiosity, and reflection about the consequences of digital actions.
You already hinted at the Media and AI Literacy framework guiding PISA 2030. Why focus on that now?
Media literacy has always been crucial, but today, with digital and social media, it is more important than ever. What students believe, aspire to, vote for – so much of it depends on the information they absorb digitally. The thing they will value, personally and professionally, is heavily influenced by their (digital) environment. So, this framework in a way is about citizenship. We are situating transversal skills like critical thinking, reflection, creativity in a concrete context: how students engage with digital media. Students will have to evaluate fake news, reflect on their understanding of digital security and certain online behaviors, and create posts themselves. We have tried to sample our tasks from real-life scenarios to include a variety of settings. AI is deeply interwoven with media: we “just” try to assess how young people navigate the online world.
Finally – perhaps a big question – but what do you see as the single biggest challenge education systems face globally today?
There are many challenges, but if I had to pick one, it would not be AI. It is the growing disengagement of students. There is a sense that school is irrelevant, boring, disconnected from reality. Many students feel: “If I really want to learn something, I can just find it online.” But at school, I think there is a lack of relevance and of connection to reality. What students learn seems boring to them! And that disengagement undermines curiosity and the joy of learning. I am not exactly sure why this is happening, I do not think that our education systems are worse, nor are our teachers less engaged. Maybe it is just that the world has changed more quickly than schools have.
But if we cannot inspire students to care, all the talk about adaptability and future skills will not matter. We need to find ways to make learning more engaging, experiential, connected to real life. We need to show students why what they are learning is valuable – not just for tests, but for their lives. That means rethinking classroom activities, textbooks, assessment practices. And everyone (parents, teachers, administrators) needs to be on board. Change does not happen just by saying “we have to do better.” It happens when practice at the classroom level actually changes.
Thank you for this very rich conversation.
Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.
Über die Vodafone Stiftung Deutschland
Die Vodafone Stiftung setzt sich für gute Bildung in einer zunehmend digitalen Welt ein, die auf die individuellen Talente und Fähigkeiten der Schüler:innen eingeht und Lehrkräfte für einen digitalen Unterricht befähigt. Die Stiftung engagiert sich für die Vermittlung von 21st Century Skills und eine bessere Nutzung der digitalen Chancen, um Lehren und Lernen auf eine neue Stufe zu heben und mehr Bildungsgerechtigkeit zu schaffen. Dazu unterstützen wir die innovativen Kräfte im Bildungswesen und arbeiten konstruktiv an strukturellen Reformen des Bildungssystems mit. www.vodafone-stiftung.de
