Development and promotion of tools for education quality assessment is a key focus of CICED’s activities. The availability of educational technologies developed by Russian expert community is the most important factor influencing the level of demand for Russian expertise in the international professional space and a main indicator of its potential.
Development of tools for education quality assessment
By supporting of development of assessment tools CICED defines its role as an engineering core in:
In frameworks of each project CICED implements the following set of activities:
- development of sets of operational, technical and procedural documentation that contain detailed instructions for tools application for different categories of users and also test results interpretation manual;
- conduction of training seminars and webinars for users and partner organizations interested in the practical use of the assessment tools;
- conduction of preparations for tools piloting at international level: translation and adaptation of tasks to national contexts in foreign countries; transfer of operational and methodological documentation; training for personnel to conduct testing;
- conduction of psychometric studies.
For 2016-2019 CICED developed plan for conduction of the following activities:
- expansion of the bank of test items of the monitoring for assessment of students subject competencies (full cycle of development of test items, conduction of pilots and testing, psychometric tests and validation of test material);
- development of country-specific versions of the tool for conducting of cross-country research (with priority to the CIS countries participating in the READ program);
- development of technology for cross-country research for developing countries, including methods of scaling and evaluation of monitoring results, technical procedures and regulations;
- development of a system of context questionnaires (teachers’ questionnaires and questionnaires for cross-interviewing) to identify causes of the testing results;
- conduction of cross-country comparative research in developing countries (at least twice with an interval of a year) with the use of Russian developed assessment tools followed by recommendations on improvement of educational outcomes;
- development of software for processing information collected through survey, storage and combination with test results that will reveal correlations and patterns in the analysis of monitoring results;
- development of tools for assessment of the research quality which will allow to control the quality of CICED’s projects.