The global and the local in educational assessment

Previous issues in Assessment and Education, such as special issue 1/2018 (Lenkeit & Schwippert, 2018) and the thematic issue 4/2016 (Hopfenbeck, 2016), have discussed the increasing use of international test results. Now, more than even before, there is a need to critically investigate the validity and reliability of comparisons using international test scores. Additionally, there is a need for monitoring and examining the tests used, how the results are interpreted, and to what extent it is possible to compare across different contexts, as these tests have implications for different education systems, educational policies and sometimes even the individual students. The question whether it is possible to compare test results across different countries and contexts is not a new one. Indeed, scholars have debated whether it is possible to compare test scores since the ‘Father of Comparative Education’ Marc-Antoine Jullien de Paris compared the school systems in Switzerland, Germany and Italy in the first quarter of the nineteenth century (Fraser, 1963; Jullien, 1817). The difference now, is the number of national and international tests administered, and how these tests shape and influence the education system locally and globally. The globalisation of education and the increase in testing preparation services offered from different organisations worldwide (Verger, Lubienski, & Steiner-Khamsi, 2016), is also an indication of the need for critically investigating whether the tools and tests offered for the education systems are fit for purpose. How can we test whether they measure what they are supposed to measure and whether results can be interpreted and compared across countries? On what criteria should the tests be assessed? The first article in this regular issue, by Ivanova, A. , Kardanova, E. , Merrell, C. , Tymms, P. and D. Hawker, addresses some of these questions by presenting a study where the primary focus of the paper is methodological. The researchers ask: Is it possible to compare the results in assessments of mathematics across countries with different curricula, traditions and age of starting school? In their study, a Russian version of the Performance Indicators in Primary Schools (PIPS) baseline assessment (Tymms, 1999) is used. Trial data from about 300 Russian children at the start and end of their first year at school were matched with parallel data from representative samples of children in England and Scotland. Similar as in the PISA tests, the researchers used Rasch measurement when equating what scales were explored. The researchers argue that although a few items showed invariance across the three countries, it was possible to link PIPS scores in mathematics from the start and end of the first year at schools across Scotland, England and Russia. Hence, meaningful interpretations of test results were possible. At the same time, the researchers acknowledge the limited number (n = 300) of students in their study, and accept that they need to replicate the study with a bigger sample. But still, the question of whether a test can be used and results compared across countries and contexts involves more than just technical questions and use of statistical models such as IRT or Rasch. The language difference is one of the main issues in international comparison (Grisay, de Jong, Gebhardt, Breezier, & Halleux-Monseur, 2007) and whether task demands of tests differ depending upon language (El Masri, Baird, & Graesser, 2016) needs to be investigated.