About IEA

IEA Research for Education Volume 10 reviews the development of the quality control mechanisms and methodologies associated with IEA’s extensive program of educational research. A group of renowned international researchers, directly involved in the design and execution of IEA’s international large-scale assessments (ILSAs), describe the operational and quality control procedures that are employed to address the challenges associated with providing high-quality, comparable data.

International large-scale assessments (ILSAs) are one of the most important tools policymakers and other educational stakeholders have to inform evidence based decision making for educational reform. Despite this, and the widespread use of ILSA data, results are sometimes misunderstood or misinterpreted. Here, we offer a brief guide to ILSAs and illuminate some of the important differences and commonalities within and across studies, limitations, and why they remain one of our most significant tools for education evaluation and reform. We focus on and compare the key studies, approaches, and structure of our own organization, the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), with other ILSAs.

Recent highlights from IEA in our July 2020 email newsletter.

Tolerance is necessary for the functioning of mature democracies where social cohesion is strong. Results from IEA’s International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS) 2016 show that, on average, European young people tend to be tolerant, but their attitudes towards equal rights for immigrants vary widely within and across European educational systems. In each of the ICCS 2016 European educational systems, young people with higher levels of civic knowledge tend to be more tolerant, while, in contrast, young people with low levels of civic knowledge tend to be less tolerant. Grade eight ICCS 2016 data indicate that in each of the 14 European educational systems, civic knowledge shows the strongest association with tolerance toward immigrants relative to the impact of individual background variables.