Norway has seen major changes in the field of educational assessment over the past decade, following the 2001 '"PISA shock" that stimulated reform of the entire primary and secondary education systems: new outcome-based curricula with cross-disciplinary basic skills were accompanied by major revision of assessment regulations,…

In this era of accountability-by-numbers, the elevated status accorded to large-scale external assessments such as the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is symptomatic of a trend towards data-driven policy initiatives in education, and the need for regular sources of outcome data to constantly feed narrow indicators of…

Observations in many intermediate and secondary classrooms and interviews with learners indicate that many young people are under-engaged or disengaged with the learning opportunities in their schools. This disengagement of adolescent learners underlines the need for a shift from systems focused on sorting to systems passionate about deep…