On March 13-14, 2025, members of the CLEAR Consortium, External Advisory Board members, and invited guests have met for the sixth time in Porto, Portugal. The meeting was hosted by the University of Porto (Prof. Tiago Neves) in Círculo Universitário do Porto. The main focus of the meeting was to coorinate the work in the final phases of the project and to wrap up the key findings and project’s messages, especially in view of the upcoming Final Conference in September this year.
The first day of the meeting, March 13, has started with an introductory input by Marcelo Parreira do Amaral, Jozef Zelinka, and Tiago Neves related to the project’s final phase. In the first part, Jozef Zelinka has recalled the Call’s requirements and highlighted the CLEAR’s specific approach to learning outcomes. In its turn, Tiago Neves has raised the awareness on the multiple national and international attempts to enhance learning outcomes through regular assessment studies and provided evidence on its questionable results. Finally, Marcelo Parreira do Amaral has emphasized CLEAR’s approach in tackling (under)achievement and formulated some leading questions to be addressed in the preparation of the Final Conference, such as: What type of and how is information on learning outcomes gathered, described, “objectified”, authorized? What dimensions of the phenomena become central in the definition of the concepts used? How are their meanings made consistent and stable? What are the “raw materials” involved in the construction of learning outcomes? Who defines them, and with what consequences? In the follow-up discussion, we have concluded that learning outcomes have increasingly become quantifiable proxies for educational achievement, often stripped of their local/regional context.
In the afternoon, the discussion continued with a particular focus on the project’s comparative analyses. Split into different author groups responsible for the various parts of the final comparative report, the Consortium members have elaborated how their contributions relate to the overall project aims and the theme of the Final Conference: From Learning to Living: Co-creating education quality across European regions. Later on, the WP7 Core Team has presented National Discussion Papers, which serve as a synthesis of the project’s results on national levels and provide information for the upcoming Innovation Forums.
The second day began with a presentation of our guest Dr. Filipe Pessoa (University of Münster) on Structural Topic Modelling. This method can be used in a variety of social science disciplines and provides a combination of qualitative and quantitative tools to analyse large text corpora. As part of the comparative analyses, some of the author teams will apply this method to provide a systematic analysis on the research on learning outcomes.
Apart from the technical session on WP1, WP9 and WP10, one important session was the implementation of the Innovation Forums. Colleagues from CODICI and University of Genoa have first presented their own findings from the pilot Innovation Forum in Genoa and then instructed the Consortium members on how to apply different tools and participatory methods in the design and implementation of the local Innovation Forums. Split into four groups, each of them was focusing on different sets of results delivered in the empirical Work Packages 3, 4, 5, and 6.
The Consortium meeting was closed with a report of the External Advisory Board, which has congratulated to the achieved results and stressed the need to communicate them also in national languages. The meeting has ended with a closing session, during which the Coordination encouraged the Consortium members to continue their comparative analyses and support the local organiser of the Final Conference in Lisbon by sharing the invitations and contacting all relevant stakeholders at regional, national, and European levels. Our last Consortium meeting will take place the day after the Final Conference, on September 17, 2025.
