Analyzing context so as to optimize the benefits of assessment

Abstract

Education and training has become an outstanding object of evaluation in the last two decades. A number of national and international initiatives have been developed with this aim. In this context, large-scale studies oriented to assess achievement by measuring students’ outcomes should be underlined. Improvement of education implies moving forward from just measuring student’s learning to explaining outcomes, which implies the need to identify the main factors related to results. This paper deals with the analysis of contextual factors, starting by underlining how important is taking them into account. Contextual factors are then differentiated from input and process ones and their main variables are identified. Finally, some examples are presented and discussed of analyses establishing relationships between contextual factors and students’ outcomes. Reflections carried out in this work are based on input from international studies, such as those developed by the IEA (TIMSS, PIRLS…), the OECD (PISA project), or the Laboratory Latin American of evaluation of the education quality (LLECE), in its second study Regional comparative and explanatory (SERCE), among others.