PISA aims to serve as a "global yardstick" for educational success, as measured by student performance. For comparisons to be meaningful across countries or over time, PISA samples must be representative of the population of 15-year-old students in each country. Exclusions and non-response can undermine this representativeness and…

This study examines the washback effects of a national test in Swedish at upper secondary schools. The test consists of three parts--reading, writing and speaking--and this study specifically focuses on the washback effects in relation to Stephen Ball's theory of policy enactment. The study draws on qualitative data from a total of 21 interviews…

The purpose of this study is to describe, critically analyse and discuss the Swedish system of assessing ethics education in compulsory school through national tests. The publicly available tests from 2013 for grades six and nine have been studied as have the assessment instructions for teachers. Staff responsible for the test construction have…

Cognitive ability tests are widely used in organizations around the world because they have high predictive validity in selection contexts. Although these tests typically measure several subdomains, testing is usually carried out for a single subdomain at a time. This can be ineffective when the subdomains assessed are highly correlated. This…

This study focuses, from a bilingual perspective, on how a Swedish national test is intended to promote critical literacy and language development in line with related aims in syllabuses for Swedish and Swedish as a second language. The material consists of reading and writing assignments and prescribed classroom preparations (including…

Subjects are asked to answer six questions, partly with a frequency and partly by marking a verbally anchored scale with five categories. Some univariate and multivariate analyses are performed to elucidate the relations between variables with the two different modes of response. Although there are similarities in results for the two types of…

The role played by written tests in Swedish schools was studied through a survey of 1,817 eighth-grade teachers (the senior level of compulsory school in Sweden) and 589 teachers of the second year of upper secondary school in three counties in Sweden (the response rate was 75%). The survey was supplemented with 51 interviews of teachers at four…

Reports on recent changes in examination policy and practice in China, England and Wales, the Federal Republic of Germany, France, Japan, Sweden, the United States, and the Soviet Union. Identifies and discusses some significant trade-offs arising from the implementation of examination policy. Discusses four nearly universal dilemmas of…

This research report explores the extent to which the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale (ECERS) (Harms and Clifford, 1980) remains a valid instrument when used to make cross-national comparisons of quality, and the advantages and disadvantages of using ECERS for this purpose. ECERS was developed to be used by a trained observer to rate the…

The educational assessment quality assurance and control practices of Germany, Sweden, France, New Zealand, and Australia are compared to illustrate the considerable variety of approaches and some of the social factors that contribute to this variety. In Germany there is considerable variation from one province to another, and quality assurance…

The system of standardized second language tests administered to Swedish junior and senior high school students is described. The tests are used to give teachers an idea of the performance levels of their entire classes, not individual students, for comparison with national norms. They are administered more than a year before the students leave…

Presented in this symposium reader are nine papers, four of which deal with the theory and impact of the Rasch model on language testing and five of which discuss final examinations in secondary schools in both general and specific terms. The papers are: "Introduction to Rasch Measurement: Some Implications for Language Testing" (J. J.…