Princeton, N.J. (February 23, 2007) —

Two of the world's leading educational research organizations, ETS and the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), announced plans today to establish a joint research and training institute. The work of this group will center on improving and advancing the science of international large-scale assessment, training and professional development.

"This project allows ETS to bring its vast research expertise to bear on the important area of international large-scale assessments, an area of growing importance for tracking educational progress worldwide," says Ida Lawrence, Senior Vice President for Research & Development at ETS. "It also provides the opportunity to collaborate closely with a highly respected international organization that currently has more than 60 member countries and conducts large-scale assessments in about 90 countries, covering all the continents."

"We see this as an opportunity to collaborate with one of the preeminent educational research institutes to advance not only the science of large-scale assessment but also to improve the ways in which the outcomes of large-scale assessment activities affect educational policy development and reform in countries around the world," says Hans Wagemaker, Executive Director of IEA. "The institute will also provide significant training opportunities for researchers from a variety of disciplines in the assessment field."

Virtual Research Center

The collaboration calls for the creation of a virtual research center designed to facilitate web-based collaboration among researchers involved in work on large-scale assessment, who work either as part of a national team or as independent staff members of IEA or ETS. The research projects will be hosted by the funding institutions.

"We hope this virtual research area will contribute to the science of large-scale assessments so that the best available information is provided to policymakers and researchers from around the world," says ETS Senior Research Scientist Matthias von Davier, who will manage the research activities in the center. "Projects undertaken in the research area will focus on issues of comparability, accuracy and interpretability of large-scale educational surveys."

Research activities associated with these issues will be aimed at:

       developing improved test design and scaling methodologies, as well as new methods for studying relationships between proficiency data and other variables

       developing and validating non-cognitive constructs that hold promise for predicting cognitive measures on the level of policy-relevant groups

       developing data-collection methodologies that improve quality of assessments

       addressing issues surrounding international assessments that will help ensure innovation and incremental improvement of these assessment programs over time

Training and Professional Development

"Another important goal of the project will be to contribute to the professional development and training of those who participate and are interested in activities relating to large-scale international assessments," explains Dirk Hastedt, Co-director of the IEA Data Processing Center (IEA-DPC) in Hamburg, Germany. "To achieve this goal, staff from IEA and ETS will explore the use of various technologies for delivering and communicating information relating to the areas of test development, sampling, data collection, scoring, data entry, scaling, analysis and reporting. These technologies may include face to face seminars; use of audio-visual media and the use of web-based technologies."

The project will also provide consulting and advisory resources to researchers and national centers wishing to conduct policy-related studies or develop reports using IEA and other international assessment databases. Plans also call for establishing internship and training support for researchers and students interested in pursuing work and careers associated with these methodologies and databases.

Dissemination Area

"While conducting research in areas related to large-scale assessment is a noble goal in and of itself, it is also important to share this information so that it can be used and applied by other professionals in the field," urges Irwin Kirsch, Distinguished Presidential Appointee and Director of ETS's Center for Global Assessment. For this reason, it is important that the research and training institute provide an avenue for disseminating this knowledge."