Representatives from ACTRC and the Philippines Department of Education gave presentations at the 18th International Conference of UNESCO’s Asia-Pacific Programme of Educational Innovation for Development (APEID), held in Bangkok on 26-28 October 2016. At a plenary session, Dina Ocampo, Undersecretary for Curriculum and Instruction, spoke on Reforms and Transitions in Basic Education in the Philippines, outlining the K–12 reform and its goals. ACTRC Director, Esther Care, chaired a plenary session on Innovations for Increasing the Quality of Education and, in her role as lead researcher of an assessment project for UNESCO’s Network on Education Quality Monitoring in the Asia-Pacific (NEQMAP), presented a paper on Issues in the Assessment of Transversal Competencies, in which she highlighted definitional and operational questions in the implementation of educational policy on transversal competencies in nine Asia-Pacific jurisdictions. ACTRC Co-Director, Therese Bustos, in her role as representative for the Philippines on the project, presented a paper on Teaching and Assessment of Transversal Skills in the Philippines, in which she discussed the place of transversal skills in the K–12 curriculum and and illustrated this by reference to the \”assessment cube\”. ACTRC Curriculum Program Leader, Marlene Ferido, presented a paper on Measuring Student Readiness as a Means of Evaluating Science Curriculum, in which she discussed the K–12 spiraling Science curriculum and the development of ACTRC’s approach to measuring students’ mastery of the skills and concepts required to engage with the Chemistry (Matter) curriculum.
