ABSTRACT
Quality of education is currently an important issue in countries all over the world. This chapter focuses on measuring the quality of education both at national and international level. Measurements of educational quality play an important role in the identification of these problems and in determining their extent and their intensity. The results of such measurements may moreover serve as an input for decision-making in respect of school improvements. Measurements at the individual level sometimes use a pretest posttest design, yielding gain scores to explore progress in learning. Of course, as with any measurement, the choice of test and the quality of test development are of tremendous importance for the significance of the resulting scores. As in the discussion on the measurement of change, the central question in the discussion on curriculum-dependent vs curriculum-independent tests is whether the tests that are used are suitable for measuring quality in education.
