Standardised International Large-Scale Assessments (ILSAs) have gained prominence in global and national educational discussions. ILSAs claim to offer valuable insights for improving education systems, but their impact on educational policy varies and has become a contested arena. This article analyses how these assessments fed educational…

This article looks at the changes made to examinations in England over recent decades and asks about the politics behind the changes. It considers how increasingly centralised the assessment regime has become, moving from a system where teachers could have a say in how pupils are assessed to a regime dominated by government approved tests. It…

In critiquing our paper on "The literacy performance of ex-Reading Recovery students between two and four years following participation in the program: Is this intervention effective for students with early reading difficulties?", Schwartz argues that we have engaged in pursuing political and ideological agendas as part of our ongoing…

This article considers the politics of adoption of a testing regime in South Africa. While the broad features of this regime are similar to those in developed countries, there are features specific to the South African context. These emerge from a combination of external and internal pressures. External pressures derive from international testing…

In the twenty years since independence, new Eurasian nation-states of the former Soviet Union have introduced major changes to the way students are admitted to institutions of higher education. Azerbaijan (1992), Uzbekistan (1993), Kazakhstan (1999), Russia (2001), Kyrgyzstan (2002), Ukraine (2004), and Georgia (2005) have all created new state or…

In a report issued in 2010, the authors found only 6 percent of U.S. students performing at the advanced level in mathematics, a percentage lower than those attained by 30 other countries. And the problem is not limited to top-performing students. In 2011, they showed that just 32 percent of 8th graders in the United States were proficient in…

There is an extensive structure of formal student assessment in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Although the structures in each of these countries were similar when they were initially introduced two decades ago, they have increasingly diverged over the last decade. This national description outlines the development of statutory assessment…