Guillermo Solano-Flores

This project focuses on assessment capacity as critical for countries to adequately assess academic achievement in their student populations. Assessment capacity is the ability of a country to effectively develop and use technically-sound assessment instruments, create sustainable assessment systems, and use information from tests to effectively inform educational policy. The project addresses inequality in assessment at the international level: Countries with limited assessment capacity do not have the infrastructure and human and financial resources needed to meet the demands of an era of globalization and accountability in which decisions about individuals and institutions are increasingly made based on scores from standardized, large-scale tests. We will assemble an international partnership focused on discussing the nature of assessment capacity in multiple national contexts and will create the draft of a tool for countries to evaluate their assessment capacity and to identify actions they need to take to increase it according to their own needs, contexts, and resources. At the end of the project, and based on the experience gained, we to intend to seek funding from agencies such as the World Bank to invite more countries to join the partnership and to develop a scaled-up version of our assessment capacity evaluation tool.