Why Measuring is Important for Learning

By Mercedes Mateo and David Evans

Assessments can generate mixed feelings and even rejection. However, they are an opportunity to improve and set future goals. A reflection on the role of assessments in learning.

Assessing learning shouldn't be controversial. We measure things that we want to see change. If we want to get better at a sport, we count our goals scored or blocked. If we want to read more, we count our books. Parents often mark their children's heights on a door over the years to celebrate their growth. If the child didn't grow at all over time, you certainly wouldn't shame them, but you'd probably take them in for a check-up!

Everyone wants children to learn while they're at school. People want their children to gain lots of things at school-like grit, teamwork, and friendships-and they also want their children to master academic skills. Literacy and numeracy are the foundation of those academic, and these open doors for all the advanced skills that let children grow up to be doctors and engineers and entrepreneurs and professors!

Why assess at scale?

So, how do we know whether children are mastering those academic skills? There's no way around it: you have to assess the kids. In the process, you don't have to shame the kids, and you don't have to scare the kids, but you do have to test whether or not they are mastering the skills they need. At the classroom level, individual teachers can assess children as they teach, checking for knowledge along the way and adjusting their instruction accordingly. (This is called formative assessment.)

These formative assessments are absolutely crucial. But they're not enough.

We assess at scale to see if education systems need reform. Formative assessments can help teachers to adjust their teaching, but often we need system-level reform in education systems, like overhauling the curriculum for training teachers, changing the criteria by which teachers are selected, or targeted mentoring to teachers who are struggling. System-level reforms require system-level assessments! We simply cannot know if education systems as a whole are struggling to help students master fundamental skills if we don't assess students at scale.

Global assessments-like the Program for International Student Assessments, or PISA-have often sparked reform. When Peru scored last in the 2012 PISA, the minister of education used that as a catalyst for reforming the education system. Regional assessments can play a similar role. In Ecuador, interviews suggest that the regional assessments (UNESCO LLECE) were again catalysts for change and powerful communication tools in justifying the need for reforms. Even national assessments can be powerful: in Brazil, states and municipalities seek out lessons from top performers.

We assess at scale to make learning more equitable. Resources aren't all that matters for learning, but resources definitely matter for learning. If education systems care about learning equity, how can they channel resources towards the places where learning most needs to be improved? System-level assessments allow central, state, and local governments to identify which schools (or municipalities or states) need resources the most and then target them with what they need to boost student learning.

We assess at scale to enable evidence-based decision-making. System-level assessments do more than just identify whether the system as a whole requires reform. As different schools (or municipalities or states) experiment with reforms, assessments allow decision makers to see whether reform schools are moving in the right direction relative to other schools. Did lengthening the school day in Pernambuco, Brazil, result in better student performance? Evaluators used at-scale testing to see. (It did.) Did mandatory preschool in Mexico result in greater learning five years later? Evaluators used at-scale testing to see. (It did, too.)

But how should we assess at scale?

We propose that many of the debates about whether or not systems should assess at scale are fundamentally debates about how systems should assess. How often should we assess to make sure, on the one hand, that we know if students are learning, but on the other hand, to avoid constantly interrupting teaching? How large of a sample? At what grades should we assess? Should there be stakes either for students or for schools?

We still have much to learn, but the variety of experiences in Latin America and the Caribbean provides a library that every country can draw on to learn from both the successes and the failures of their neighbors. A series of blog posts in the coming months will share these experiences. The next post in this series will provide a deep dive into the current state of assessments, how they have evolved in individual countries, and how they have been used to influence policy-based on a new publication, The State of Education in Latin America and the Caribbean 2024. Subsequent posts will dig into how individual countries have improved assessment or used them to build overall education quality indices, as well as how the region uses assessments to monitor progress on the Sustainable Development Goals.

Let's get every child learning-and assess just enough to know that we're achieving it.

Read our most recent study on the current state of education and how evaluations can reduce learning disparities here.

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