Building National Assessment Systems That Prioritize Learning and Adaptation
Assessment often gets a bad rap. Education stakeholders worry that teachers are teaching to the test rather than teaching to ensure that students have the skills they need to be successful in the world. They also worry that assessments sometimes get used for the wrong purposes—to punish low-performing schools or teachers, for instance—or don’t get used at all, wasting scarce resources. However, when used right—to inform instruction—assessments are absolutely critical. In low-income countries, the lack of systematic large-scale assessments has often meant that governments and other stakeholders do not have a clear picture of learning gaps, which handicaps efforts to address those gaps.
