Introduction to Reliability and Validity of International Large-Scale Assessment

Abstract

Although international large-scale assessment of education is now a well-established science, non-practitioners and many users often substantially misunderstand how large-scale assessments are conducted, what questions and challenges they are designed to address, and how technologies have evolved to achieve their stated goals. This book focuses on the work of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), with a particular emphasis on the methodologies and technologies that IEA employs to address issues related to the validity and reliability (quality) of its data. The context in which large-scale assessments operate has changed significantly since the early 1960s when IEA first developed its program of research. The last 60 years has seen an increase in the number of countries participating, with a concomitant expansion in the cultural, socioeconomic, and linguistic heterogeneity of participants. These quantitative and qualitative changes mean that the methodologies and assessment strategies have to evolve continuously to ensure the quality of data is not compromised. This chapter provides an introductory overview of the chronology and development of IEA’s international large-scale assessments.