More about project
PIAAC – Survey of Adult Skills in Slovenia that is of national importance not only for adult education in Slovenia but also for other sub-systems and sectors comprised 2 essential parts in Slovenia:
- data gathering in the field and
- analytical-applied part.
It is only with the synthesis of both parts that the project goals will be achieved. The essential special feature of the Slovenian survey was that the project goals did not include the goals of OECD PIAAC – Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competences, but rather included analytical-applied national goals. The gathered database is one of the richest in general and enables numerous comparisons, analyses and cross-sectional studies.
The two parts of the project together encompassed three activities that were further broken down into individual assignments. The activities represented complete units in terms of content but were also interconnected thus enabling the achievement of project goals, i.e.:
- development of indicators for the measurement of adult competences;
- preparation and implementation of a trial and main measurement of competences; and
- analysis of the state-of-affairs in the area of adult competences and an international comparison.
The project received financial support from the European Social Fund and the Ministry of Education, Science and Sport (MESS). It was implemented by a consortium of partners including the Slovenian Institute for Adult Education as the lead partner which was joined by the Statistical Office of the Republic of Slovenia as well as three faculties of the University of Ljubljana (Faculty of Social Science, Faculty of Arts – Department of Educational Sciences, Faculty of Economics).
Over the course of 2013 and 2014, the focus was on the first and second activity that were aimed at the preparation and implementation of the pilot and main surveys conducted by the Slovenian PIAAC consortium, while the third activity was the focus in the subsequent period. The work on the preparation of conceptual and theoretical groundwork for thematic studies and analyses was carried out in parallel. The results of the PIAAC survey in Slovenia were published in June 2016 after the OECD removed the data embargo.
Thematic studies and analyses (in the Slovenian language) were designed by an interdisciplinary team of 25 researchers from all partner institutions in the consortium. Individual researchers from the PIAAC consortium focused on determining the links between competences and current needs on the labour market. They also studied the effects of competences on the social and economic achievements of an individual and the society and assessed the extent to which the educational system ensures the acquisition of relevant competences in both adults and young people as well as the situation of the vulnerable groups of the population.
The following tabs provide more information on the individual parts of the project in Slovenia:
Part 1: data collection in the field
The first part of the PIAAC survey in Slovenia involved the adaptation of the OECD PIAAC methodology and collection of data about the skills on a random sample of adults in Slovenia aged 16 to 65, whereby researchers visited households to gather the data. The representative sample of the adult population living in Slovenia included 9000 contacted persons from all regions of Slovenia, 5165 of whom were tested directly. The data was collected from April to December 2014.
The survey plan of the PIAAC in-the-field survey encompassed a comprehensive basic questionnaire for the collection of socio-demographic characteristics and instruments for the testing of skills and competences via a computer. This framework allowed the collection of data that were used to identify and measure the differences in the skills between individuals and countries that were assumed to contribute to the personal success and competitiveness of the society as a whole, which in turn yielded a more complete picture of the human capital inventory. These were the most important building blocks for the continuation of the project into the analytical-applied part.
Part 2: analytical-applied part of the project
The analytical-applied part of the project encompassed in-depth analyses of databases featuring data collected as part of the PIAAC in-the-field survey for the Slovenian sample and international data. The project envisaged this task to be carried out in two phases:
- the first phase entailed analysing the state-of-affairs and other comparable data and theoretical background (which is a sort of foundation for further analyses) and
- the second phase involved more complex statistical processing of the database with a synthesis of the theory and the empirical data.
The aim of the analytical-applied part of the project was mainly to come up with proposals and system solutions. This meant applied use of the findings obtained for the purpose of upgrading the expert groundwork for the design of policies on the development of adult competences, determination of national indicators for the monitoring of the state-of-affairs and progress, development and upgrading of recommendations for the further development of education programmes as well as the development, preparation and implementation of the training for educators teaching in adult education and training programmes for the application of modern learning and teaching forms and methods. These were also the final indicators of the project entitled Measurement of the Education and Training System Effectiveness for the Improvement of Adult Educator Qualifications 2013–2015, which however depended heavily on the involvement of a broader circle of stakeholders with an interest in the problem and other sectors as consensus needed to be reached about crucial documents such as recommendations, strategies, indicators and expert groundwork for policy-makers.
Project details
Project manager at the ACS (Slovenian Institute of Adult Education): Petra Javrh, PhD
National project coordinator: Estera Možina, MA (T: 01 5842 591; E: ester.mozina@acs.si)
Project associates at the ACS (Slovenian Institute of Adult Education): Katja Bider, Vesna Prislan, Špela Lenič, Urška Pavlič, and Franci Lajovic
Associate for administration and finance: Vesna Prislan
Contract custodian: Borut Čampelj, MSc
Consortium partners: University of Ljubljana (Faculty of Arts, Faculty of Social Sciences, Faculty of Economics), Statistical Office of the Republic of Slovenia
Project value: EUR 1,339,000.00
Project implementation period: 1 January 2013 – 30 June 2015