Searching for an interpretation of educational achievements: limits and possibilities of international evaluation studies

Authors

  • Alejandro Tiana Ferrer

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.24965/gapp.v0i3.429

Keywords:

Comparative education, evaluation of educational achievement, large-scale evaluation, Index of Economic, Social and Cultural status (IESC), school effectiveness

Abstract

International studies aimed at evaluating educational achievement, started in the mid-20th century and extensively developed in the two last decades, had a two-fold purpose: On the one hand, they intended to support a rigorous comparison of results achieved by students in different education systems, providing as a result a valuable set of data which has improved our knowledge about educational achievement. On the other hand, they intended to contribute to the explanation of educational achievement through the settlement of relationships between the main factors identified. This paper analyses the latter issue, focusing on the possibilities opened by these studies and their contributions to such an explanation, and the limits and difficulties found for explaining the effect of the main factors influencing achievement. Two main sets of variables are identified. A first group includes some external factors to education systems, and a second group focuses on internal variables related to educational organisation and activities. Taken into account the macroscopic perspective adopted by those international studies, it is argued that the information provided for that kind of explanation is forcefully limited. Granted that conclusion, they should be complemented by additional research and evaluation studies allowing more detailed analyses.

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Author Biography

Alejandro Tiana Ferrer

Doctor en Filosofía y Letras (Pedagogía) por la Universidad Complutense y Catedrático de Teoría e Historia de la Educación de la Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia. Es Director General del Centro de Altos Estudios Universitarios de la Organización de Estados Iberoamericanos para la Educación, la Ciencia y la Cultura (OEI). Ha sido Secretario General de Educación, así como Director del Centro de Investigación y Documentación Educativa (CIDE), del Instituto Nacional de Calidad y Evaluación (INCE) y de la International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievementy. Es autor de dieciocho libros y más de cien capítulos y artículos de revista sobre temas relativos a los sistemas educativos contemporáneos y evaluación educativa.

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Published

01-06-2010

How to Cite

Tiana Ferrer, A. (2010). Searching for an interpretation of educational achievements: limits and possibilities of international evaluation studies. Gestión Y Análisis De Políticas Públicas, (3), 35–66. https://doi.org/10.24965/gapp.v0i3.429