Assessment reforms around the world

This chapter presents a broad overview of assessment reforms around the world, with a particular focus on the experiences and changing landscape of selected education systems. Owing to their individual social, economic and educational circumstances, these countries planned and implemented their assessment reforms in their own distinctive ways but generally found tensions between the assessment reform policies and assessment practices. Many of these countries embarked on an education reform with a highly emphasised Assessment for Learning agenda. The outcomes of these assessment reforms appear to have been undermined by the dominance of high stakes summative discourse, issues of accountability and the readiness of the teachers for the change necessitated by the assessment reforms. The current problem is the general belief that summative tests are the best vehicle to raise student performances. To improve student achievement across the curriculum, it is suggested that improving teacher quality and their capacity to use assessment as central to learning may be the most effective way to attain this goal. Copyright © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V..