Cross-National Assessment of Educational Achievement: A Review

The story of cross-national evaluation studies in education is the story of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement. IEA origins date back to the end of the 1950’s when educational researchers from a dozen countries convened under UNESCO auspices and decided to launch a feasibility study. The results of the project were encouraging (Foshay, 1962) and led to a major survey of mathematics achievement in 12 countries, involving 133,000 students, 13,500 teachers, and 5,450 schools (Husen, 1967). As the mathematics survey was nearing completion, the participating countries decided to start a new venture, a survey of six subjects: Science, Literature, Reading Comprehension, English and French as Foreign Languages, and Civic Education. In addition to mathematics and apart from classical foreign languages, the above subjects cover practically all the principal academic subjects in the secondary curricula of the part??ipating countries. Altogether, ?? is most recent study has involved some 300 experts from 20 countries, ??ur of them less developed coun??es. Instruments had to be constructed in 14 different languages. Approximately 258,000 students, 50,000 teachers, and 9,700 schools were involved. This is indeed a gigantic task, involving complex problems of administration, finance, and data analysis rivalling if not surpassing those encountered in any previous study in the social sciences. Comparative education studies have traditionally been confined to descriptive material, with international agencies such as UNESCO and OECD taking the lead in the accumulation and exchange of data relating to different patterns of educational organization, curricula, and teaching methods. The IEA studies are the first to introduce into comparative education established procedures of quantitative research. Since educational patterns vary extensively from country to country, the investigators look upon this series of cross-country comparisons as a way of using “natural experiments” as a surrogate for experimental conditions that arc economically and politically unfeasible for the researcher