Submit a Manuscript to the Journal
Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice

For a Special Issue on
The Present and Future of International Large-Scale Assessments for Monitoring Educational Systems

Focus:

International large-scale assessments (ILSAs) such as PISA, TIMSS, and PIRLS, were developed with explicit goal of providing national policy makers with system level information regarding their respective educational systems.  Such information can be used to provide relatively simple rankings of countries, but at a deeper level, the information supplied by ILSAs can help countries to engage in discussions on enacting system level change.  We argue that there are three immediate concerns facing ILSAs.  First, for most countries, ILSAs are low stakes but expensive endeavours and thus their future could be fragile.  Second, most researchers focus on only a small portion of the data. And thus, examples of richer uses of ILSAs for policy purposes are difficult to find. Third, there are instances where ILSAs have been used to support claims that go far beyond their intended use or design, which we argue that in the long-run, can damage the credibility of ILSAs.  The aim of this Special Issue is to present empirical and theoretical studies of ILSAs with a focus on their use in monitoring systemic changes in educational systems.

Papers in this issue

We invite both empirical and conceptual papers on topics including (but not limited to):

• Methodologies that advance system level trend analysis with a focus on responsiveness to international crises or mitigating systemic educational inequality.
• Improvements in the development of non-cognitive indicators to support measurement of the impacts of international crises or systemic educational inequality
• Innovative methods for matching ILSAs with other sources of national or international data
• New opportunities arising from computer-based testing, such as log-file analyses, with particular focus on how these affordances can be used to advance our understanding of system level trends.
• Misuses of ILSA data both at the individual level and system level
• New methods of reporting findings for purposes of communicating to policymakers.

We will welcome papers that use any international large-scale assessment.  Examples include, but are not limited to, PISA, PIAAC, PIRLS, TALIS, or TIMSS.  We especially encourage proposals from scholars focusing on data from sub-Saharan Africa (SACMEQ) or Latin America (LLECE) as long as the work addresses the topics listed above.

Practical Information & Timeline

The proposal should include:

1. Title of the article
2. Author name(s), affiliation(s), and contact information
3. A summary of the article, highlighting novel features
4. An explanation of the article’s contribution.

Prospective authors ought to submit their proposal document to the Guest Editors by 16^th January 2023, via the following email address: [email protected]

Successful authors will be invited to submit full papers for peer review. The following timeline is anticipated:

• Proposal submission deadline (submission scholar one): 16^th January 2023
• Invitation to submit for peer review: 1^st March 2023
• Full manuscript submission deadline (submission via journal's peer-review system): 30 September 2023
• Anticipated publication date: 2024

Instructions for AuthorsSubmit an Article