Global assessments play a major role in shaping education policies. Having the ability to evaluate your school performance globally has many advantages, especially for school administrators.
There are a range of global assessments that are undertaken by many different schools around the world. These assessments are standardised which means that the results can be compared to understand how each individual school compares to others in various countries around the globe.
Here are three ways that international benchmarking and global assessments can shape education policies.
Global Assessments Can Help to Identify Strengths and Weaknesses
By students partaking in global assessments, educational policymakers can easily identify the strengths and weaknesses of the education systems in different countries. For example, students who undertake the standardised tests for 15-year-olds in the subjects of reading, maths and science will be answering identical questions no matter what country they’re in.
The results from these assessments allow school leaders to identify areas where certain countries are performing well and also those countries that may be struggling.
These findings can then be used by policymakers to develop clever policies that will help to address the weaknesses of certain education systems and also to build on the strengths of these systems.
Global Assessments Can Help to Drive Education Reform
It has also been evident that global assessments can help to drive education reform around the world. Many countries whose education systems were falling behind those of other countries have been able to improve their overall systems and achieve better results.
Essentially, this has led to greater investment in teacher training and comprehensive reviews and amendments to a school’s curriculum and teaching programs.
By identifying the successful strategies used by high-performing educational systems, policymakers have been able to implement similar strategies in their own education system and hence, improve the standard of education that they offer to their students.
Global Assessments Can Foster International Cooperation
Thanks to global assessments, educational institutions around the world are now more connected than ever. Educators now have the ability to compare their educational standards with other countries right around the world.
Essentially, this has led to an open channel of communication between policymakers from different countries in order to discover each other’s best practices and to learn from each other.
This type of cooperation can be instrumental in the development of international education policies that can help to improve educational equity and prepare students for the global workforce.
In Summary
Overall, global assessments have and continue to play a major role in shaping education policies around the world. These common assessments have helped major policymakers to identify certain strengths and weaknesses in the educational systems of different countries.
This has helped to drive and shape education reform right around the world as policymakers are now cooperating to create high-quality educational policies that can only help to improve the educational standards of all students around the globe no matter what their individual circumstances may be.
