ABSTRACT
The ten chapters were produced as a collaborative effort by a group of countries that have been working together for over ten years in an OECD project that collects and publishes cross-national comparative information on education for use by governments: Network A of the Indicators of Education Systems (INES) Project. INES Network A focuses on reporting, generating and improving the collection of information on the knowledge and skills of students and adults in OECD countries. Their efforts to develop a strategy for collecting information on student performance resulted in the implementation of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), and the group continues to conduct development work to improve the utility of assessment data. This volume marks a turning point in its work, with the successful implementation of PISA, and it covers the rise of international assessments, assessment practice in traditional and non-traditional domains, recent policy uses of information from assessment and indicator programmes and, importantly, technical issues in using, analysing and presenting information from assessments in meaningful ways to inform educational policy.
