Large-scale assessment as a tool for monitoring learning and teaching: The case of Flanders, Belgium. Paper presented in a symposium on “What types of testing will improve education?"

Traditional tests for large-scale assessment have been criticized for several reasons, such as their mismatch between the vision of competence in different domains and the content covered by the test, and their failure to provide relevant information for guiding further learning and instruction. Their dominant accountability use as high-stake tests is also an issue of debate. To achieve that large-scale assessments function as tools for monitoring and improving learning and teaching, one has to move away from the rationale, the constraints, and the practices of traditional tests. As an illustration the paper will present an alternative approach to large-scale assessment (focusing on elementary school mathematics) developed recently in Flanders, Belgium Using item response theory, twenty four measurement scales were constructed, each representing a cluster of curriculum standards, and covering as a whole the entire mathematics curriculum. A representative sample of 5,763 sixth-graders (12-year-olds) belonging to 184 schools participated in the study. Performance on each scale was summarized by estimating the proportion of students in three categories: insufficient, sufficient, and good mastery. Overall, the more innovative curriculum standards were mastered worse. Few gender differences in performance were observed. The advantages of this approach and its further development will be discussedstatus: publishe