International Large-scale Studies of Educational Achievement – The Involvement of the Czech Republic

Abstract: Since 1989 the Czech educational community has had very limited ex-perience with education measurement. Comparative data on education out-comes were not available at either the national or the international level. In the 1990s, the situation changed dramatically. The Czech Republic joined interna-tional organisations specialising in comparative studies and several internation-al enterprises in the field of education measurement. Consequently, there ap-peared also the first attempts to address the issue nationally. In this article the author gives an overview of the international large-scale surveys on educational achievement that have taken place in the Czech Republic since 1990 and sum-marises their main findings. At the end of the article, the author provides brief information about the national initiatives in this field. Within a short time peri-od, the surveys produced extremely rich data sources of very good quality. The aim of the article is to inform the scientific community about these sources, to raise interest among its members in using them in their own research, and thus to contribute to their further exploitation