Michael O. Martin

The debate on learning assessments in developing countries

Over the past decade, international and national education agencies have begun to emphasize the improvement of the quality (rather than quantity) of education in developing countries. This trend has been paralleled by a significant increase in the use of educational assessments as a way to measure gains and losses in quality of learning. As interest in assessment has grown, low-income countries have begun to adopt and adapt international and other assessments for a variety of uses, including the comparability of national quality with other countries, improved ways of measuring reading achievement, and further attempts to reach marginalized populations within a country. The present group of papers provides multiple perspectives on the debate currently underway about the best approaches to create and use learning assessments in low-income countries.

Providing Data for Educational Policy in an International Context: The Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS)

Policy-makers in many nations of the world are involved in educational reforms. In order to make effective educational decisions for the 21st century, policy-makers need information of a wide variety of kinds, for example, comparative performance data and curriculum information from other nations. National assessments can be valuable, but international surveys provide a broader base of information and allow countries to view their current status and planning within an international perspective. The purpose of this paper is to describe the goals of the Third International Mathematics and Science Study and the steps being followed to insure that the results from the study will meet the diverse informational needs of policy-makers.

Create News; Consortium for Research on Educational Accountability and Teacher Evaluation; Mathematics and Science Achievement in the Middle School Years: An International Perspective

This issue of CREATE NEWS contains an overview of the results of the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) for middle-school students. A description of the TIMSS project and general international results are presented here in an article authored by researchers at the TIMSS International Study Center at Boston College. More speci®c information about the performance of U.S. middle-school students, teachers, and curricula follows the international overview.

Measuring Changing Educational Contexts in a Changing World: Evolution of the TIMSS and PIRLS Questionnaires

With each TIMSS and PIRLS assessment, IEA’s TIMSS & PIRLS International Study Center at Boston College has improved the quality of the context questionnaire data collected about educational policies and practices. Over the 20 years that TIMSS and PIRLS have measured trends in educational achievement, the questionnaire data have been evolving to measure a stable set of policy-relevant constructs. With trends in valid and reliable context questionnaire scales, changes in students’ achievement from one assessment cycle to the next can be examined in relation to changes in the policies and practices of interest to determine whether there are patterns. TIMSS 2015 provided trend results for about a dozen such scales (e.g., Instruction Affected by Resource Shortages, Safe and Orderly School, and Early Literacy and Numeracy Activities) and PIRLS 2016 is expected to provide similar results.

Dependable Trend Measurement Is Not Just IRT Scaling: Commentary on "Linking Large-Scale Reading Assessments: Measuring International Trends over 40 Years".

Linking IEA’s international reading assessments across 40 years is an interesting endeavor from several perspectives. Being able to examine trends in reading achievement at the 4th grade over such a long period and relate these to policy changes during that time span is an attractive idea. However, this work brings to the fore many thorny issues that should be considered in linking together several disparate assessments, and the technical complexities involved in using IRT scaling to analyze trends in large-scale international assessments. According to Strietholt and Rosén, the main purpose of the “article is to demonstrate how to calibrate the achievement scales from past and present studies on a common IRT scale.” In particular, this research relies on data from 2 different studies that already measure trends in reading achievement as described below.