Educational Assessment in Latin America

This collection presents educational assessment research from Latin America, adding to a relatively small but growing body of research considering educational assessment and evaluation issues in this large region. The predominance of Chile reflects its early highly centralized education system, and the fact that it adopted national testing before other Latin American countries. It was also an early participant in international assessment programmes. Other countries have followed the trend of implementing national testing, and to a lesser extent participating in international surveys. The complementary development of technical expertise in quantitative research methods has enabled extensive analysis of the large data sets generated by these testing and assessment programmes.

Taken together, the evidence reported provides a means not only of reviewing educational quality issues in Latin America, but also of facilitating comparisons that allow the context specificity of equivalent research conducted in western developed countries to be considered.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy and Practice.

Sue Swaffield is Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, UK. She is also a Fellow of Wolfson College Cambridge, UK, and Adjunct Research Fellow at Griffith University, Australia. She teaches and researches in the fields of educational leadership, school improvement and assessment for learning. Her career-long involvement with assessment has included research and development projects large and small, a wide range of publications, leading a national assessment association, and numerous presentations, courses and workshops around the world.

Sally M. Thomas is Professor of Education at the Graduate School of Education, University of Bristol, UK. For 25 years, she has published widely on the topics of educational quality, effectiveness and improvement using both qualitative and quantitative research methods. Her research interests are focused on professional and school learning communities, pupil learning, citizenship and education in developing countries including East Asia, Africa and South America.